Remembering one of the most brilliant kids I’ve ever met. A young man who would never have been admitted to Thomas Jefferson High School, Bronx Science, MIT, et al. and yet… — When a former student dies, it is just wrong. We are not meant to watch our children die. No matter how often it happens, it is always a wrong in the human soul. Eric Hahn died on October 14, apparently of an equipment accident while diving deep into the unknown…

We need to care for our kids’ brains at least as much as the FDA tries to protect their bodies. Educational researchers, and educators themselves, refuse to look into the side effects of their policies, their implementations, or anything else they bring to students. You’ve decided to lock all your…

Cleaning up your language doesn’t help if you won’t change your attitude. — retardation. noun formal: slow development, or development that is slower than it should be Words matter. As someone who thinks of himself as both a writer and an encourager of writing, I know that. But actions matter at least as much. And ideas matter most of all. Perhaps the second…

Perhaps schools must lower standards, raise expectations, and accept the fact that human children are not all the same. Lower Our Standards. No, not something you hear often in education writings, but it is August when we can watch televised baseball (and softball) at every age level. It’s the month…

NPR’s This American Life listens in as a student is assaulted by literacy instruction — Ira Glass: “But he has dyslexia. So reading an unfamiliar word, he has to decode it.” Cassidy: “If it’s a big word that I’ve never seen before, like that word — I don’t know what that says.” Ira Glass: “OK, let’s walk through that one.” Cassidy: “Wait, deh, E. Deh, whip. Deh, eh…

What happened in Uvalde and what it says about cowardice, heroism, and if this nation really gives a **** about kids. — Americans like to pretend they’re heroic. Many Americans like to pretend that “a good guy with a gun” is the solution to “a bad guy with a gun.” Most Americans tolerate their governments handing out military equipment to local police departments and most accept that, for cops, equipment plus an…

It isn’t that “explicit training in phonemic awareness” can’t be helpful to some beginning readers, it’s that phonics and phonemes aren’t about the purpose (or the facts) of reading. “[T-ball is] not about [baseball] skill development. Kids don’t have full coordination or visual acuity yet, and they can only absorb…

As Americans we can choose to love our children, or we can choose to keep worshipping guns. But obviously, we can’t do both. The Republican Party answer to school massacres is to lock children up. They know this is the answer since they know that their pseudo US Supreme Court…