This Is Your Brain on Awesome, Part 2

I introduced you to the first five of Louis Cozolino’s “Nine Things Educators Need to Know About the Brain.” An article excerpted from Cozolino’s book, The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom, appeared at the Greater Good blog. Here are the remaining four insights from Cozolino…

Morning Motivators Book Giveaway

Leave your morning motivation tips in the comments and be entered to win a free book from The Mailbox! Consider it a great way to help your fellow teachers, as well as your second-favorite Mailbox blogger (me).

More on Teachers, Students, and Technology

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.

Singing the Common Core Blues?

I may have been destined for The Mailbox from the moment I created my own set of quizzes and a final test for a novel I was teaching in a literature class. You know how it goes; you have a subject to teach but you are unsatisfied with the supporting activities and lessons. So you sit in a quiet place on a Sunday afternoon and create them yourself.

Teachers Expect the Unexpected

How much of a teacher’s day can be filled with tasks not on your job description? Janitorial service, emergency medical first-responder, mental health care, family counseling, transportation coordination, interior design, administrative management, hall monitor!

Cage’s Rules for the Classroom

Visionary composer John Cage and educator Sister Corita Kent developed a list they titled “Some Rules for Students and Teachers” back in the late 1960s. And as upper grades students and teachers prepare to head back into the classroom, I think it’s an inspiring document worth considering.

What Is the Shape of Your Summer?

You know what I always wanted to do? Teach summer school.

Getting Back On Track

Almost all of us have our days. What kind of days? Those days when no matter how well-prepared you feel going in, events seem to find a quick and unexpected way to unravel in your face like a rogue wave. Very few of us seem to escape these kinds of days.

Thoughts on Pineapplegate?

Are you familiar with Pineapplegate? Because if you’re not, you really should hear what this is all about. Although the reading selection—an extensively edited version of a brief scene in a Daniel Pinkwater novel—and its accompanying questions have appeared in standardized ELA tests since 2006, it was only recently that this test selection made its way out of the classroom and onto the desks of a few well-connected education bloggers and journalists.

You Can’t Get No Satisfaction?

The most starkly unsettling finding in the survey was teacher job satisfaction, which has reached its lowest level since the survey series began more than two decades ago. Just 44% of respondents are satisfied in their jobs. Coupled with this growing lack of job satisfaction is the survey’s other dramatic finding—more teachers than ever before are planning on leaving the profession in the next few years. Twenty-nine percent of teachers say they’ll probably look for a new career.