Life
Students Don’t Need You to be a Perfect Teacher Right Now
In early March, my university administration informed me that I had a week to transition my University of Virginia course Books Behind Bars online. This is a class I’ve been teaching for the past decade, where UVA students meet regularly with incarcerated youth at Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center in Richmond, Virginia to explore questions…
Read MoreHow to Teach Your Kids When You Have No Idea What You’re Doing
As the COVID-19 threat wreaks havoc on our lives, all of us are coping with the utterly unpredictable and traumatic circumstances as best as we can. For parents, in particular, who have been thrust into the role of a full-time stay-at-home mom and/or dad and full-time teacher, this new world is especially terrifying. John Dewey,…
Read MoreHow Great Students Can Change a Teacher’s Life
We’ve all heard stories about great teachers who have changed students’ lives. Far less common are stories from teachers about students who have changed their lives, yet anybody in the teaching profession knows that learning is a reciprocal activity that can have a profound impact on both members of the exchange. Just as there are…
Read MoreI Have a Dream (of a Different Kind of Classroom)
Since the day that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic speech nearly six decades ago in 1963, he has inspired thousands, if not millions, of people to dream bigger. Whether that means standing up against social injustices, volunteering in our community, or contributing to education reform, many of us have been inspired to leave…
Read MoreWhat Mandela Learned From War and Peace: How to Keep Hope Alive in Troubled Times
In Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela singles out War and Peace as a book that had a profound influence on him during his 27-year incarceration. He says that he returned to the novel over and over again, referring to it as his all-time favorite years later. As the world remembers December as the anniversary…
Read MoreWhat to Do When You Lose Your Passion for Teaching
Most of us who got into teaching believe in the passion and power of a classroom to inspire change in our students, in our society, in our world. And yet somewhere along the line, whether because of bureaucratic pressures of working within an educational institution or because of the sheer demands of life, we may…
Read More3 Critical Skills Every College Student Needs to Change the World
Globalization. Diversity. The future of work. The fate of our democracy. For years these topics have dominated national conversations not just in the professional and political worlds, but also on college campuses where teachers and administrators are—or should be—thinking hard about how well we’re equipping the next generations of students for the world they’re about…
Read MoreWhy Teachers Must Bring Humanity to The Classroom
The Metamorphosis in the Classroom The Metamorphosis happens sometime between the moment when John Smith exits his car in the college parking lot, treks across the beautiful grassy campus, enters the building where he’s about to engage in something called Teaching, and finally, steps foot into the Classroom where said Teaching will take place. The…
Read MoreTo Teach is To Love: Dostoevsky’s Message to Educators in Our Troubled Times
Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, has just lived through the heartrending tragedy of his father’s brutal murder followed by his brother Dmitry’s wrongful conviction of the crime. His heart now reeling a few days after the grueling trial, Alyosha, twenty-three, goes to the funeral of the schoolboy, Ilyusha Snegiryov, and there meets a…
Read MoreHow I Found My Voice and Myself in War and Peace
At a book talk I gave a few years ago, a teenage boy in the audience, intrigued by the stories I’d been telling about young characters’ tortuous journeys in War and Peace, asked me a question during the Q&A. “Did Tolstoy, like, really experience all that?” The ingenuous question got me thinking, not only about…
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