As you review the year, offer a final exam, determine final grades, and issue report cards, this letter I wrote to Marcmight helpclarifying your grading and especially, I hope, your attitude toward grading.

If kids were all alike, we could teach them all alike, but if some kids are different, we must make them like the others, or failing that effort, we must learn to make instruction fit their differences.

The author says, “This strategy is so great, when I become Czar of Education, I will require its use, daily in every class.”

Last month Bill Page advised teachers to remember two important words: “shut up!” Now Bill says, “I have two more words for you to love and write on your palm…”

Don’t try to change me–you can’t do it. I am the only one who can change me.
Show me, teach me, help me to see what you see. I can change myself.

Teachers are permitted to flunk kids instead of teaching them; Kids are permitted to flunk subjects instead of learning them.

I am pleased to proffer some pretty certain classroom prophesies for the 2012, “back-to-school,” new, calendar year.

Whether you call it intercourse, conversation, exchange, chat, discussion, interlocution, discourse, communication, or gabbing, it ought to be required in every class.

Seven prophesies, 15 fresh-start ideas, 21 thoughts and lots more for a new semester

Discovery of a pivotal mistake in my teaching radically changed my life and lives of my kids.