My First Paying Teaching Job: Hooray!

After several months of temping and grinding out the workweeks in your typical office slob job, a school district has finally hired me as their newest teacher of social studies! I can hardly contain my excitement as the prospects of teaching the movers and shakers of tomorrow spring to life! It’s going to be fun.
And [...]

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Where Do Ethics Fit In Today’s Classroom?

Talk to any professional educator in the United States today and you will hear endless gripes about underperforming students, helicopter parents, and unsympathetic and detached administrators. What is noticeably lacking (at least noticeable to me, anyway) in this discourse is a vital question: In a technologically hyper-connected 21st century, where does morality fit and, how [...]

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Student Teaching History in American Suburbia

It’s been awhile since I’ve last updated this blog. From January to early May, I’ve been consumed with the transformative exercise known as student teaching. At a fairly white, suburban high school in culturally-deprived northern New Jersey, I taught American history to juniors, seniors (my high school was unique in that it required a fourth year [...]

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I’m Back But I Haven’t Returned From the Dead

It’s been quite awhile since my last post but I’ve returned! Here’s what kept me busy these past several months:
student teaching!
From mid January to early May, I’ve spent an exorbitant amount of time student teaching in a northern New Jersey suburban high school. I taught American history and an American history through film course. It [...]

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Making Happy Students

Today’s high schools mostly focus on academic achievement and extracurriculars such as athletics and various social clubs. Course content is conventional and subject-specific: language arts, history, science, mathematics, and of course P.E. A school in Germany, however, is adding another class requirement: happiness.
“‘We want to teach contentment, self-confidence and personal responsibility,’ the school’s director Ernst [...]

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