Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
I’ve been listening to “The Circle Game” lately. As a teenager I was pre-nostalgic before I really had anything to remember, and this Joni Mitchell song was one of a dozen loaded onto a mixtape. Later, I played it on nights driving… Continue reading
Many pedagogical books aim to reach “both busy precredentialed and veteran teachers,” as China Harvey and Lisa Herzig hope for Teaching Beyond the Timeline: Engaging Students in Thematic History. In both its realism and optimism, this book absolutely… Continue reading
With a protagonist so extra that the pages practically turn on their own, Laurie Frankel’s Family Family slides in enough wisdom about families and those who live in them (that is, all of us) to embroider on generations of samplers. We learn this novel’s expansive definition of family from… Continue reading
As a writer, eighth grade history teacher and school administrator, I’m as curious as anyone about what will happen when the robots eventually take over (more on that later). But after reading Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, I’m newly optimistic about the possibilities of AI in education – and trying to live more like … Continue reading
While reading Nina LaCour’s Yerba Buena on a drowsy Los Angeles winter afternoon, I turned the pages in a rush. I wanted to experience what would happen to main characters Emilie and Sara: first as teenagers in their own separate tales of trauma, then as adults eventually finding and re-finding each other in this coming-of-age romance. At the same time, the book’s sensory beauty made me want to notice… Continue reading
To the title of this new book by Regie Routman, I would add a couple of other aspirational hyphenated adjectives: soul-lifting and life-affirming. The Heart-Centered Teacher: Restoring Hope, Joy, and Possibility in Uncertain Times lives up to its promise of renewal. It strives to be a mosaic of sorts: a combination of sometimes searing, sometimes poignant personal stories with on-the-ground insights from decades of experience. Routman believes that we are most fully ourselves when… Continue reading
Back to the Future may be a much-loved movie and a Broadway musical, but it’s also the time-traveling inspiration for Maurene Goo’s Throwback, a deliciously smart YA novel. Samantha Kang is a Korean-American teenager who chafes against her mother’s desire to fit into all the places Sam couldn’t care less about. Throwback starts with a family country club interview that Sam nearly tanks with her questions, driving her mother, Priscilla, bananas. Sam finds refuge… Continue reading
Jai Chakrabarti’s first novel, A Play for the End of the World, has lived in me since I read it three months ago. With the Holocaust as backdrop, Chakrabarti traces the story of two survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto: Yet 30 years later the past returns… Continue reading
As teachers over the past decade, we find the question of how to respond the day after a cataclysmic event has come up more than any of us would want. What do our students need and crave in these moments? How much do we share of our own feelings… Continue reading
I wanted to read this book not only because Bruni has been one of the most versatile writers in the New York Times over the years (restaurant critic and Rome bureau chief, to name a couple), and not only because I read his book about college, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, twice before my older son applied, but also because I had my own brush with vision loss… Continue reading
Sarah Cooper 