Audience: Educator

What Teaching 8th Graders Has Taught Me About Homework and Stress

This is my first year as a full time teacher, after working for many years in education as a part-time teacher, researcher, and coach with Challenge Success. Throughout the year I’ve seen the complexities and nuances of how student stress works up close. Stress doesn’t just come from one place. It’s not only teachers assigning too much homework, or a hectic school schedule, or one too many extracurricular activities. It’s deeper than any one of those things. It’s cultural, and it’s something we not only feel, but also go in search of.

A Season of Growth Mindset

While upside down in what must have been her hundredth attempt to stand on her hands for more than a few seconds, our first grader said, “You know, my teacher told me that every time we try to learn something, a new pathway grows in our brain.” How appropriate for a season of growth! As an educator, I could not be happier that the students of Room 114 have now become proponents of what scholar Carol Dweck identifies as a growth mindset.

The Teacher’s Note: Too Much, Too Fast

Thursday was the technology professional development day at the District, and although I thought the day was excellently planned and carried out, and I was impressed with all the presenters, when I left, I felt battered and pessimistic. I have been trying to figure out why.

A Student’s Perspective: The Importance of a Caring Community

On paper, Castilleja is not so different from other schools. There are other private schools, even all-girl schools, that can claim the same benefits and advantages that Casti can. At least, I used to think this was the case. A few weeks ago, I discussed the practice of Senior Talks with a friend from a different school. Her school is much like Castilleja – small, all –girls, but located in a different state. They also have senior talks, where seniors speak about an important experience or idea that they want to convey to their peers, in a speech that is often moving and deeply personal. However, at my friend’s school, the best senior talks get voted on in a competition to win scholarship money. At Castilleja, the only prize you get for a senior talk or 8th grade speech is flowers …

Helping Students Learn to Engage

What’s the most important determinant of students’ growth in college? According to Nancy Sommers, a researcher at Harvard, it’s not feedback or carefully designed assignments or skill acquisition, though these are central. These aspects of learning, Sommers finds, are overshadowed by another, less obvious but more important: students’ attitude. Specifically, a shift in attitude, away from evaluative and instrumental views of education (e.g, “I complete school work to get a grade, or because I need a degree to get a job,”) and toward a sense of purpose and connection.

Nurturing the Emotional Lives of Asian American Students

In Cupertino, California, Hung Wei, a mother and local school board member, has worked passionately for almost a decade to improve the mental health of Asian American students. Throughout the school year, she gathers her teen staff members from Monta Vista High, a campus with a mostly Asian American student body, to produce Verdadera, a school publication that Wei founded. Verdadera, which means “truthfully” in Spanish, is devoted to honest expression and mental health. In every issue, students write about matters closest to their hearts: love, secrets, dances, body image, sexual identity, relationships with parents, and also intense academic pressures, competition, loneliness, depression and fears for the future.

High School Is About More Than Test Scores & Rankings

The Washington Post ranking of US high schools has just been released and, as you can imagine, parents around the country are either congratulating themselves on the great choice they made or having an anxiety attack because their child’s school didn’t make the cut. While we could argue about the methodology used, we mostly want to convey that school choice should be about where your child fits and can succeed as much as anything else. We thought hearing from high school counselor and CS board member Lisa Spengler on how she helps her students choose a high school would help provide some perspective on an alternative way to think about high school choice.

Helicopter Teaching and the Challenge of Mythrules

In an era of hyper-focus on students’ academic performance, is it possible that schoolwork is actually too easy? I recognize that this might seem a strange question, given how much we hear of stressed-out students, slogging through hours of homework and blizzards of standardized tests. If anything, school is too hard, right?

Illicit Attention

One SAT Saturday in mid-September, between frantically cramming vocabulary and mathematical formulas, my friends and I started the typical pre-SAT complaining: how we should have studied harder and how we should have taken more prep classes — how this girl got a perfect score and that guy cheated on the math portion. You know… the usual. After a few minutes of bantering, one of my friends announced that she wished she had bought Adderall. A drug commonly known as the “study drug”, Adderall is a psychostimulant used in the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, or ADHD. She felt too tired from studying for tests, writing essays and filling out college applications from the week before to fully concentrate on the college-prep test. To some, Adderall abuse may sound foreign, but Adderall and abuse of other attention-deficit drugs is growing among high school and college students across the nation.

What I Learned About Why Kids Cheat: A Parent’s Perspective

“Well, I’m not saying I cheat all the time but I do feel the pressure to get straight A’s.” “I am willing to stand up at a school board meeting and explain to them why, we, as students would like to see individual rankings done away with. Because we are ranked, and well aware of our ranking amongst our peers, we are constantly competing.” A teacher leaned over to the new freshman mother and said, “Don’t worry, freshman are not aware of the rankings.” “Yes they are, Mr. Kravitz,” he says earnestly. “Yes, they are. I always knew what my ranking was and so did every other kid I knew since freshman year.” These are the comments I heard at the first Challenge Success meeting I attended last May. These were the responses to a teacher’s comment about wanting to address, “Very creative and out of control cheating issues that high schools are experiencing.” What I found so refreshing at this m …

BEYOND A WAITRESS

Five months ago, I started working nights at a restaurant. Though the restaurant is cozy and well-attended, I noticed something peculiar: many diners were not communicating with each other. They were distracted by their screens. Disturbed, I wrote an op-ed and published it in The Seattle Times. At the end of the article, I included this short bio: “Shoshana Wineburg graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a degree in American Studies. She waits tables in Seattle.” Comments ensued. Most people responded to the article’s content; others could care less. They wanted to talk about my degree. One user wrote that my bio was “the saddest part of the article.” Someone else said my degree was not “worthwhile,” and that waiting tables after graduating from Stanford was “kinda depressing.” I haven’t just waited tables after Stanford. I’ve done other things. But that’s beside the point. The point is that …