When I was five, I used to scribble in pretend cursive on scraps of paper, then thrust them at my mom and say, “Read!” And, despite whatever other things a mother of four who also worked full-time had to do, she would always pause to point out the letters that my childish scrawl had accidentally …
I stumbled upon the New York Public Library Main Branch centennial celebration the other day. It was an astounding reminder of the importance of the act of writing, of what constitutes writing and of all the cultural artifacts that taken together make a writing life. The building, that imposing, iconic structure with marble lions flanking …
As a newly minted teacher-consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, I remember being asked to deliver an in-service to a nearby school district on using technology in the middle school classroom. This was, probably, 1998. It was the late Pat Hunter, a co-director of the site, who at the time invited me to lead …
Note: This post originally appeared on March 19, 2011, at Cooperative Catalyst as part of the #blog4nwp effort. There’s the infrastructure. And then there’s the idea. The Internet is like this. The infrastructure consists of nodes and super nodes, of cable, routers, switches, of computers and hyper-text markup language. But it’s also an idea: a …
Note: This post originally appeared March 17, 2011, at Cooperative Catalyst as part of the #blog4nwp effort. As William Zinsser famously said, “Writing is thinking on paper.” I would amend that to say, “Writing at its most authentic is thinking on paper … and through video … and via audio … and through gaming … …
I’m old. My knees tell me this. My back tells me this. The mirror tells me this. And I’ve found that getting old(er) makes me cynical makes me feel justified in those moments when I descend into cynicism. Particularly when it comes to education reform. After all, as a student I “learned to read” with …
I’m nearly done reading the book Better by Atul Gawande. It’s an insightful examination of the medical profession – he’s a surgeon – on the one hand, and a terrific treatise on how it’s possible to improve one’s work in general, on the other. Improvement not through innate brilliance, or more resources or even working …