Category: Character
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Are you a mentor or a de-mentor?
There is no shortage of articles and musings on the issue of teacher burnout. Why can’t we gain and retain quality teachers? Low pay. Little respect. Testing. Classes wrought with internal and external malaise: apathetic students, dated facilities, finger-wagging parents, administrators, and legislatures all getting speared with blame. I can attest to many of these…
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A Call to Help Students Find Purpose
The simplified story is that one of my students cried after I made her pick up garbage for a day. The real story goes more like this: Each trimester, I take my students on a service learning field trip. We spend a morning volunteering at a local homeless shelter. In the afternoon, students pick up…
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Stop the Blame Game: Teaching Students to Take Ownership
A second grader made me cringe the other day. I visited my wife’s class and a girl was showing the class her pictures from a recent soccer tournament. Someone asked how her team did. Her response? “We got second place. BUT, we actually should have gotten first because the other team cheated and the refs…