Peter Gow, Trying to Further Education and Educators

Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

A Hard Truth About the Way We Treat Children

On September 5, 2014   /   NotYourFathersSchool  

The teaching profession and most of the non-profit and social service sector operate on an assumption that has seemed unassailable to me all of my life: that human beings innately and inherently love and value children above the lives of adults, above all things. “Women and children […]

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Ferguson: Tethering Ourselves to What Matters

On September 2, 2014   /   NotYourFathersSchool  

A while back I realized that once upon a time I was actually in Ferguson, Missouri. It was around Christmas of 1970, and I was visiting a friend—in fact a girlfriend—in Florissant, the other town with which Ferguson shared its high school. Ferguson and Florissant were then, at […]

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The Blame Game: Elite Colleges and Students’ Double Lives

On August 25, 2014   /   NotYourFathersSchool  

It’s been a tough summer for “elite” colleges—those eight or ten or twelve schools whose names everyone knows and about which everyone has an opinion. I suppose these schools should be pleased that their brands, or at least the collective “Ivy League” brand shared by eight of […]

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The Original Disruptor: A Cautionary Reflection on DEAD POETS SOCIETY

On August 12, 2014   /   Blackboard Jungle, charisma, Dead Poets Society, disruptive change, disruptive innovation, innovation, NotYourFathersSchool, Robin Williams, students, teachers, teaching, To Sir With Love  

The tragic death of Robin Williams has moved us all, no matter what our special memories of his oeuvre might be: Mork, Adrian Cronauer, Peter Pan, or even John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in one of my favorite films, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. For […]

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Twitter as the New Sampler, and Reflections on Tweets of Wisdom

On August 6, 2014   /   Benjamin Franklin, historic homes, NotYourFathersSchool, respect, samplers, Sean Junkins, students, Teacher Tom, Teacher Tom blog, teachers, Twitter, wisdom  
Twitter as the New Sampler, and Reflections on Tweets of Wisdom

In some ways my summer Twitter feed is an extension of the visits to historic sites that my antiquarian family (first with my parents, later with my children) has been making all of my life. On some wall of every Colonial or 19th-century or early 20th-century house […]

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Strategic Thinking and—School Therapy?

On July 31, 2014   /   Crane MetaMarketing, Grant Lichtman, independent schools, NotYourFathersSchool, school accreditation, school marketing, strategic planning, strategic thinking, students, Tiffany Hendryx, zero-based strategic thinking  

Over the past few years I have found myself moving in circles that involve school advancement as much as the teaching-and-learning side of the house. Here I have been made privy to both the anxieties of independent school leaders on matters like enrollment and fiscal sustainability and […]

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A Letter to New Teachers

On July 21, 2014   /   disruptive change, new teachers, NotYourFathersSchool, professional culture, professional learning, professionalism, school culture, school missions, students, teacher orientation, teachers, teaching  

Note: This post originally appeared here in July of 2011. It has proved to be both popular and durable, and as the 2014-15 2015-16 school year approaches, it seems appropriate to re-post it—PG If it hasn’t already, within a very few weeks school will be starting, and […]

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Paying It Forward: Further Thoughts on Why We (or at least some of us may) Teach

On July 20, 2014   /   David G. Strachan, Harold Bloom, James Boulger, John Kasson, Leo Strauss, Marlea Brock, Merold Westphal, Nichols School, Norman Holmes Pearson, NotYourFathersSchool, Robert Loewenberg, Stephen Gurney, students, teachers, teaching  

In my last post I suggested that a powerful motivation for some teachers seems to have been a desire to “correct” the teaching that they themselves experienced. I probably implied, without meaning to, that this is a sole impetus for those “restitutional” teachers, as if they were […]

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Restitutional Teaching: Another Thought On Why We (or at least some of us may) Teach

On July 16, 2014   /   arts education, Beaver Country Day School, Dolores Umbridge, NotYourFathersSchool, restitutional teaching, Severus Snape, student engagement, student-centered teaching, students, teaching, The Intentional Teacher  

I have had some wonderful teachers in my life—a solid bunch in my public elementary school and another group in my independent junior high–high school. They shaped and influenced my life in ways I wish I could still tell them about; I’ve managed to get to the […]

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Failure Studies

On July 10, 2014   /   failure, iteration, neuropsychopharmacology, NotYourFathersSchool, prototyping, schizophrenia, scientific research, social justice, Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology  

We’ve been reading quite a lot about failure lately, and clichés and nostrums aimed at getting teachers to embrace failure and to encourage students to do the same trip up and down my Twitter stream at the same rate similar exhortations to embrace “excellence” might have done […]

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF TRADITIONAL LANDS

I here affirm that the offices from which I work are situated on lands that have a very long and continuing history as a locus of residence, livelihood, traditional expression, and exchange by the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Abenaki, Mohawk, Wabanaki, Hohokam, O’odam, Salt River Pima, and Maricopa people. The servers for this website are situated on Ute and Goshute land. We make this acknowledgment to remind ourselves, our educational partners, and our friends of our shared obligation to acknowledge and work toward righting the inequities and injustices that have alienated indigenous peoples from the full occupation and utilization of these spaces.