Posts by Alden S Blodget
Creating Better Schools: Let’s Look to Parents
[Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice” that we are reposting this week.] “We are greater than and greater for, the sum of us.” — Heather McGhee, The…
Read MoreWhen It Comes to School Culture, Words Aren’t Enough
Educators must take systematic steps to ensure that a school’s mission and values are reflected in students’ and teachers’ actual experiences. Schools have different cultures created by their beliefs, values, goals, and behavioral norms—cultures that are often described on a continuum from nurturing to toxic. An increase in cases of depression, instances of suicide, and…
Read MoreEmotion, Intelligence, and Learning
Two of the most persistent myths about learning are that emotion and rational thought can be treated separately and that emotions interfere with clear thinking and learning. They certainly can. Grief and rage or joy and excitement can easily overwhelm focus and motivation for even the most interesting lesson. So, it’s not surprising that educators…
Read MoreOff To See the Wizard
On April 24, 1990, my father was killed in a Pennsylvania hospital. He was in the third day of recovery from elective reconstructive knee surgery when an error his doctors had made erupted somewhere in his abdomen. Most of his blood vessels ruptured and he bled to death. His doctors had prescribed too large a…
Read MoreSchools: The Persistence of Failure; Paths to Success
I have spent a lifetime in schools–as student, teacher, administrator, parent, and trustee. I am a weary veteran of the endless wars over what’s to blame for the sorry state of education. As covid and virtual schooling have made even clearer, we need to do a better job. Test scores are lousy; achievement and learning…
Read MoreLet’s Dump The ABC’s — And D’s and F’s, Too
The votes are in. Experience, common sense and neuroscientists agree: People don’t learn when they are scared. Well, they learn, but they don’t learn math or history or whatever lessons schools are actually trying to teach. Kids learn to hate school or to fear Mr. Smith or even to hate themselves, and the cause is…
Read MoreRelying on Your Own Mind
A recent issue of Time magazine launched the new “Kid of the Year” recognition. Along with this year’s selection of Gitanjali Rao, the magazine profiled four other young people whose accomplishments, imagination, and engagement in life are impressive. As I read about them, I couldn’t help imagining them among the thousands of other students I…
Read MoreSleepwalking through School
Failure is the fate of most teachers at least some of the time. In their classrooms sit students whom, despite their most heroic efforts, they just can’t reach–like TJ, a boy who traveled from Indiana to attend an eastern boarding school and found his way into my classroom. Every fall, I struggled to get students…
Read MoreOnline School Doesn’t Need to Replicate the Classroom Model
The sudden immersion into distance learning has not been easy for students or teachers. An article last spring in Forbes cites surveys that find that over 75% of high school students hate the experience, while teachers have been largely unprepared for it. Many teachers describe the difficulties and steep learning curve with which they struggle.…
Read MoreVoices from the Invisible: The Reality of Black Lives in Our Schools
School people, especially boards and heads, are really good at spinning words into fluffy fantasies of utopian worlds where they have “created diverse, inclusive communities,” “protected and empowered the most vulnerable” and “cultivated environments to unlock the richness of diversity.” Lofty sentences appear in glossy catalogs and websites and swaddle prospective parents and students of…
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