Most Read from past 24 hours

We need a radically different teachers’ union. The current model of a teachers’ union doesn’t fit the future educational landscape. Basically, the current model began with the industrial “labor and management are adversaries” model, giving laborers a collective voice in the face of the perpetual push to maximize profits. But schools and school systems aren’t
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There was only one poem I was required to memorize in all my years of schooling – Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Like most students today, I had an education in which memorization was not emphasized. My understanding is that it is even worse now. Today, the word “memorization” is
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“How many of you have closed your email and then immediately reopened it because you might have just gotten an email?” Laughter rippled through the audience — including me — as we listened to Emily Cherkin give a talk at The Brearley School in Manhattan about tech and kids and us: parents, kids, educators, email
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Who would sympathize with the Roman official who had Jesus crucified? Even among many who don’t consider themselves Christian, Pontius Pilate is a cultural symbol of an abusive, authoritarian power. But there are a few movies, such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, that present him as an almost sympathetic figure. That’s not
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Heroes. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines a hero as “a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities.” That “man” doesn’t fit the zeitgeist these days, so I looked up “heroine,” who is “a woman admired and emulated for her achievements and qualities.” Because I prefer the latter definition for my purposes here, I
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Rewarding children for good behavior has become commonplace in the American family. But in a recent piece for The Atlantic, Psychologist Erica Reischer cautions that reward systems can be surprisingly harmful to children and their families. Using the example of the ubiquitous sticker chart, Reischer writes that the system of children earning their way to
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