This morning I ate a hefty bowl of Froot Loops. Sometimes our teaching can be like this: tasty but bereft of nutrition.

Bad analogies in education abound, so we ought to cherish good ones. In writing of the place of education in American democratic life, John Dewey introduces a metaphor of nutrition that feels useful now.

Conscious teaching does not require reading. But reading won’t hurt. Good hearts and minds have wrestled with questions of teaching and learning since the days of Aristotle and likely before. Let’s learn from our intellectual forbearers.

The ‘me’ I hold so dear is a fiction. And guess what - so is yours. How these fictions collide, meet, and tangle in the classroom deserves some attention.

'School' is a big idea. It's such a big idea, in fact, that we can barely see it except in pieces.

Teachers are not doctors. Yet, for some needless reason, educational lingo is laden with tropes of medicine. This is a problem.

Let’s get back to gaps.

The challenge of the gap metaphor of is that it inherently depicts a fissure between a ‘desired state’ and a ‘current state’. And it feels very right to do so. With the New Year barely in rearview and 2020’s effects still lingering around my waistline, it sure as hell feels appropriate to worry about gaps between what I want and where I am. Gaps are familiar American territory. We love problems, performance, and analysis. And gaps give us the opportunity to solve, do, and measure away. But maybe this familiar apprioach is incomplete…

The ‘achievement gap’ persists as one of the most entrenched and problematic metaphors in education. It’s been around for so long that it’s become a naturalized way of thinking. It’s an assumed truth. But naturalized constructs and assumed truths should make us both wary and curious. What are the consequences of this habitual assuming? What ways of seeing and teaching do we abandon as a result of this view?

Fifty years after Paul Friere first published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, too many educators still think of teaching as transaction. What Friere described in his famous banking concept, and what others often call the ‘transmission model’ of education creates problems for our teaching practice.

Given the dumpster fire that the last few years of COVID life have been for so many of us, I thought a dash of fury might be in order. A little righteous murder might just be a wholesome thing now and again.

Welcome! I’m glad you’re here.

Consider this post an orientation of sorts. I’d like to to help you make sense of my intentions in stringing sentences together and offering them publicly