Latest posts
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Not Everything Resolves…That’s Kind of the Point.
I want to tell you about the worst argument I have ever witnessed at a Thanksgiving dinner table. It was not about politics. It was not about religion. It was about a parking spot. My father, a man who is, in most other contexts, a perfectly reasonable human being, spent forty-five minutes constructing an airtight…
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The GoFundMe Activity: Crowdfunding Mastery in Any Content Area (Classroom Template Included!)
As you may have noticed, I’ve continued combing the wide world of the internet to find social media and/or website templates to manipulate into a tool for students to showcase their content mastery. While I’ve typically grabbed “safe” websites that feel like they have an obvious connection, today’s is something that came at me from…
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We Blamed Google. Now We’re Blaming AI. We Need to Stop. A Case for Intentional Instructional Design in the Age of AI
I was a senior in high school in the fall of 2001. The internet’s influence was growing. Google was becoming more mainstream. And the adults in charge of education were absolutely losing their minds about it. The concern, stated with full sincerity by serious people in serious publications, was that students would simply Google everything,…
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The First Thought Is Just the Beginning (Project Zero Thinking Routines Pt 4)
We are four posts into this series now, and I want to take a second to zoom out. Post One was about giving students the tools to recognize that they’re already thinking. Post Two was about teaching them to slow down and notice things… really notice them, the way you notice a piece of art differently on…
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The Funko Pop Summary: Where Biography Meets Box Art
Let me tell you something about my office. It is covered in Funko Pops. Floor to ceiling, shelf to shelf, every available surface. I have lost count of how many I own, but the number is somewhere north of embarrassing and south of intervention. My classroom alone has roughly thirty of them staring at my…
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We Schooled the Curiosity Right Out of Them
Will Ferrell once played legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray on SNL. If you’ve never seen it, the bit is basically: Harry Caray is a man completely unmoored from social norms, asking the most unfiltered, bizarre questions imaginable: to scientists, to astronauts, to anyone fortunate enough to sit across from him, with zero apology and maximum…
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Your Students Have Thoughts. These Three Routines Make Them Say Them Out Loud.
How many of us can relate to the following situation? Last year, I was teaching a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, and we had just finished reading a primary source, a firsthand account from a Freedom Rider. Heavy stuff. Important stuff. The kind of stuff that you want students to genuinely sit with. So…
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Come Vibe With Me!
I owe you an apology and an explanation. Back in February, I announced the launch of Vibe Coding for Educators, my 20-part YouTube series designed to take teachers from “I have never touched a line of code in my life” to “I just built my students a custom French Revolution simulator, and I cannot be…
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It Takes ZERO Thought to Snag These Templates
Let me tell you something that will either deeply resonate with you or make you close this tab immediately. I think about thinking. Like… a lot. Embarrassingly a lot. From reading philosophy and psychology texts, to staring into the void and wondering why my silly “lizard brain” likes to do things. It’s all thinking about…
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You Won’t Look Like an April Fool with These NEW Groupchat Templates!
About a month ago, I shared some social media templates both inspired by and missing from the epic collection amassed at Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Website. If you missed that post, there’s a dating profile template, a Nextdoor template, and an Instagram profile page, all free and fully editable to use with your students!…