I don’t know if anyone else experiences serendipity when they read, but I find it all the time. I’ll find the same content in two completely disconnected books! Sometimes the happy chances of serendipity occur when I am escaping into a celebrity game show. I have stumbled across three words this calendar year that I’ll Read More >>
The Clash asked the question To a catchy tune: Should I stay or should I go? That’s been the question for years now, As the walls close in to crush The teaching profession. First they came for the curriculum And tried to prevent us from Actually thinking about what we taught To make us into Read More >>
I keep getting people telling me that I should “lean in” to using A.I. to do my creative work for me. My short answer to this nonsense is… NO. But I’d like to give some reasons and an example of why I don’t want to let large language models or A.I. art creators take over Read More >>
A few months ago, my wife had an idea for a second Dr. Seuss parody to follow up on 2015’s “How the Dirth Stole Learning”. She simply said, “I am the Codex. I speak for the books.” I’ll have more to say about this series later, but for now, here is the complete, month-of-Sundays collected Read More >>
In 2008 and 2010 I published two books for teachers with Scholastic Professional Books. They are no longer available in print. Actually, I think they are no longer available at the Scholastic website at all – not even as e-books. This is not a big surprise. Teacher books don’t have a long shelf life and Read More >>
This post is about three comments I received on posts on my Facebook page in the past few months, all of them negative. All three posts upset me at least a little bit, but all three posts made me think about why we communicate and what we hope to achieve in doing so. This post Read More >>
On Friday, May 16th, I went on field trip to Blue Lake Elementary, a neighboring elementary school with 8 of my Creative Writing students. What happened next was magic. Or the finale of some long-term magic. Whatever it was, it was – I think – the opposite of what is generally being encouraged or allowed Read More >>
What are you here to learn? When you do your own writing, You learn who you are And what you stand for And what you stand against And what you love And what you makes you feel alive. When you have someone or something write for you, You learn to lie. You learn to cheat. Read More >>
My mother once saw me guest speak as an author and cartoonist at a young authors’ event at an elementary school near the house she once wintered in here in Florida. In my speech I spoke rather glowingly of my childhood full of feverish enthusiasms and creative endeavors: books, an attempted science fiction super 8 Read More >>
Two strands of the education reform agenda have never made sense to me, because they completely contradict each other: Strand One: We want excellent teachers. We should get rid of bad teachers, and hire and retain excellent teachers. Teachers are the most important determining factor in a child’s educational success. Great teachers can change life Read More >>