Sometime back in the 16th century, a Saxon nobleman was heard to declare, “The future is digital!” A few years later, in 2011, The Mailbox responded with our first mobile app, Holidays and Seasonal Celebrations. In 2012, still hearing the clarion call of that prescient aristocrat, we added Kids in the Kitchen and Seasonal Songs….
STEM
Invoking Curiosity
This may be the last place on the Internet to get around to mentioning the amazing feat that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) pulled off in landing Curiosity on Mars. JPL engineers have become celebrities. Ridiculously amazing and stupendously glorious photos have been beamed back from the red planet by Curiosity. A tricky, nail-biter of…
And that’s the way it was…
The evening news. Growing up in my house, watching it was part of the day’s rituals. Despite whatever was happening in the world—including Vietnam, Watergate, and long gas lines—watching Walter Cronkite was how my father spent his time digesting dinner. As someone who idolized his father, I watched and listened to Cronkite too. A few…
What Would a Teacher Do?
Sometimes I can go on a tear and have something that I want to write about here at the Exchange just about every single day. Then we have a stretch like this recent one, where I go missing for a week and a half. What’s brought me back is another number. The number is 15,800,000,000….
What Is the Shape of Your Summer?
You know what I always wanted to do? Teach summer school. Despite the trials, tribulations, triumphs, and trickery of teaching an entire, standard-length school year, there was a sizable chunk of my addled brain that wanted to teach summer school. In fact, a few times I had constructed entire designs for a special summer academy…
Light Dawns on Marblehead
In college in the previous millennium, I had the pleasure of becoming good friends with a fellow New Englander out of Concord, Massachusetts. These days he’s a physical education teacher in Pennsylvania, but back then we were simply undergrads who liked robust, raucous, and challenging dialogue. We were once engrossed in a conversation with some…
Do Small Groups Work?
Whether back in the Stone Age when I was a student or in that other millennium when I was a teacher, the small-group thing never quite worked for me. As a student, unless I was in a small group with kids who were not my close friends, it was always too easy to spend too…
An Invitation From the Upper Grades Exchange
When looking back over the year of Upper Grades Exchange posts I wrote in 2011 for a “year in review” post I never finished, it was not difficult to see that you—my readers—are most likely to react and comment on topics that involve some amount of controversy. Technology in the classroom, education reform, class sizes,…
I Wash My Hands of Responsibility
By now you’ve no doubt received all of your National Hand Washing Awareness Week greeting cards from friends, relatives, and secret admirers. It happens this time every year, our mailboxes stuffed with sincere or humorous cards reminding us to wash our hands to fight off the never-ending assault of germs and bacteria. There’s always that…
Accurately Assessing Math Knowledge
There’s this one kid who always seems to be underfoot when I go home at the end of the day. Everyone claims he’s my youngest son. Even he claims it’s so. Who knows? I do seem to have quite a few memories of him being around since the moment he was born. I walk through…