My good friend, Dr. Joe Lizza, runs campus activities at Rowan University, and we chatted on my podcast about student life a while back. He told a fascinating story during the interview. It turns out, during the first months of COVID, when everything shut down, his team discovered that a surprising number of college students … Read more
I remember sitting in my classroom at 4:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, staring at a stack of essays I hadn’t touched in three days. The hallway had gone quiet an hour earlier. My coffee was cold. I had a splitting headache that had started somewhere around second period and never let up. A parent email … Read more
I was one of the teachers who signed up to do after-school detention. It was easy money, but patterns began to emerge the more frequently I sat in. It seemed to be the same community members from our student body appearing over and over. They weren’t bad kids, but they were definitely frustrated, overwhelmed, and … Read more
The first time I really understood what testing does to a kid’s brain, I wasn’t even teaching my own subject. I was proctoring a state reading assessment for a group of sophomores, walking the rows as you do, when I noticed one of my history students staring at his screen with that glassy, thousand-yard look. … Read more
I remember standing in the hallway during passing period, coffee in hand, when a student I’d never taught came up to me and just started talking. About her morning. About a fight with her mom. About how she didn’t know if she could make it through the day. I didn’t know this kid, but she … Read more
I remember the exact moment I realized something had shifted. I was teaching my World History class, and we were discussing primary-source accounts of the Rwandan genocide. A student raised her hand and asked, completely matter-of-fact, “Why didn’t they just move to a different country?” No malice. No coldness. Just a genuine question that revealed … Read more
I remember sitting at my desk during planning period, staring at a stack of unit tests on the causes of World War I. For weeks, I’d watched my sophomores confuse long-term causes like militarism and the alliance system with short-term triggers like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I’d seen it in their document analyses, … Read more
In month 3 of my first job, teaching World History for three months by then, I still had a student who hadn’t muttered a word. Not once. She turned in maybe a third of the assignments. I remember standing there, thinking, “I have no idea what to do with this kid.” That moment stuck with me … Read more
I vividly remember standing in the back of my classroom watching a student meticulously fold a paper football. He wasn’t disruptive. He wasn’t sleeping. He had simply checked out so completely that origami felt like a better use of his time than the debate we were having about the Treaty of Versailles. That moment stuck … Read more
I still remember the moment in the spring of 2016 when a student raised his hand not to answer a question, but to ask one that stopped me cold. “Mrs. B,” he said, “why are we learning about the Treaty of Versailles the exact same way every single class learns everything else? Read the chapter, … Read more
I remember the exact moment a teacher I was coaching realized she had completely lost one of her students. She had been struggling to reach this particular kid for weeks. No eye contact. No participation. Assignments were turned in blank or not at all. She told me about it during one of our coaching calls, … Read more
I remember the exact moment I realized that “just try harder” wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It was the second semester with a group of high school juniors in a World History class. I had spent the previous evening meticulously crafting what I thought was a genuinely interesting lesson on the Silk Road, complete … Read more