Melissa Tamura writes about online degrees for Zen College Life. She most recently ranked the best criminal justice schools

Throughout history, teachers were making discoveries, taking actions, or participating in events that forever changed the world.

Pythagoras was a mathematician, philosopher, and teacher who’s theories are still taught in schools. He’s best known for the Pythagorean Theorem that relates to right triangles, however, he also determined the relationship of math to music and the movement of stars and planets. Later in his life, Pythagoras was a teacher in India and founded a Croatian institute where he taught philosophy. He also founded the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a secret society devoted to the study of mathematics.

Known as the person who established the theory…

So here’s the situation:

You’ve been teaching for quite a while. You’ve pretty much gotten a handle on classroom management, paperwork, classroom rules, and any number of the other day-to-day tasks we encounter. But how many of these teaching vices do you struggle with? I know I’m not guiltless in these areas. In fact, I’ve had run-ins with most of these. Not all of them, of course.

1. Luxuria (extravagance or lust)
   While most people think of lust in a sexual kind of way, in the original context, it essentially meant excessive love of others. Even so, some teachers take this one quite literally and end up losing their jobs over abusive relationships with their students.
2. Gula (gluttony)

…

This summer, I began playing golf. I’ve actually wanted to learn for a while now as I have a handful of friends who enjoy the game. Over the last few years, I have expressed that interest to some of my friends. Last spring, one of my friends saw me at church and told me to come out to his truck. When I got there, he handed me ten golf clubs.

So last summer, I went to a couple of driving ranges a few times and learned from some of the good golfers in my life. One of these men in particular has really been helpful. It’s great that he also happens to be the best golfer I know, and I…

It all started innocently enough. As a band director, I have been to numerous rehearsals of orchestras, jazz bands, mariachis, bands, and even choirs. So when Mr. Teacher (of www.learnmegood.com) asked me if I wanted to join him for choir practice, I was excited.

“Well, I was just watching these 100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You A Better Teacher. But I have a few minutes to spare. Wait a minute, I didn’t know you could sing!” I responded.

“I doesn’t,” was the puzzling reply.

Thus began the longest day of my life

If I had simply pulled out my handy New Revised Teacher Dictionary, I would have known I was in for way more than I had bargained…

I have a very simple question for the language arts teachers out there.

A little background first
When I was in school and took the TAAS reading exams (as well as the SAT), I quickly discovered that I am a fairly slow reader. I also don’t get a lot of the specific details when I read a passage. I have since worked on developing that skill and have made some definite progress.

What I learned worked best for me was to read the questions before I read the specific passages. This way I could skim through the assigned passages and know what I was looking for. Sometimes the questions were so specific that they didn’t require any reading of the…

This is a guest post from Karen Schweitzer who is a writer for TeacherDegree.org, a site that specializes in information on teaching degrees.

Finding time to go to the library or conduct research for the classroom can be downright impossible for a busy teacher. Fortunately, there are plenty of reference materials on the web that can guide educators to lesson plans and other resources that can be used in the classroom. Here are 50 online reference sites that would be useful to almost any teacher:

General Reference Sites

• The Educator’s Reference Desk – The Educator’s Reference Desk is an extremely valuable online reference site for teachers. Specific features include lesson plans, teaching tips, and information about teaching

…

Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, was the subject of the book and movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. An eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth, he is now a martial arts champion, holding a combined 21 National titles in addition to several World Championships. Josh is president of the JW Foundation, an educational nonprofit– www.jwfoundation.com He is currently training for the World Championships of his third discipline, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and lectures nationwide on the subjects of the learning process and performance psychology. Waitzkin lives in New York City.

A few weeks ago, I returned to the classroom of Dennis Dalton, the most important college professor of my life. From the back of an amphitheater seating…

I believe that every teacher has the potential to reach out and impact the life of every student they have in their class. The key is that it takes a whole lot of dedicated attention and effort.

My theory is that it is relativaly easy to positively impact about 60% of the kids in each of our classes. The challenge comes from two types of kids.

1. The “trouble makers”
2. The “quiet kids”

What are some of the most effective techniques you have found to reach these?

Instead of going about my normal routine of listing ways that I think it is possible to reach students, I want to open up discussion here. I have started it off with…

Everybody makes mistakes
Everybody has those days
Everybody knows what what I’m talkin’ ’bout
Everybody gets that way

Nobody’s Perfect!
I gotta work it!
Again and again ’til I get it right
Nobody’s Perfect!
You live and you learn it!
And if I mess it up sometimes,
Nobody’s perfect!

Oops. I got a little carried away there in my Hannah Montana glam rock! Sorry about that.

But it’s true, everyone messes up. Our students do, and so do we! I found that having a small group of teachers nearby really helped me out in the early years. I would go to dinner with some, I would call some up, I would…

I recently wrote the most-commented article on this site to date about the number of hours teachers work and comparing those to standard business world people. As I write this one, I’m sure it will stir up just as many responses, though many of them will surely be in disagreement with me. Just keep reading, and tell me where I’m wrong at the end!

One of the comments to that article said something to the effect that “nobody works harder than teachers do!”

While I agree with the sentiment, I think it’s possible for our own passion to cloud our word choice at times.

Comments continue coming in about that article, and I saw an email right before I went…

Is it just me, or do students seem to get to the end of the year and begin ignoring rules and classroom procedures that have been established all year long? This is my first time at my current middle school and it’s worse than anywhere else I’ve taught before. Already. And TAKS is next week, followed by six weeks of school. I hear they’ll get way worse.

What are some strategies you use to keep the students on task as they seem to shut down at this point in the year?

Recently, I have come across a number of people writing about rights in the education sense.

Some seem to pit parents, teachers, and students all against one another. Some seem to think that parents and students gang up against the poor teachers. Still others throw the wicked old administrators into the mix. It seems most of the bloggers I’ve read seem to have the teacher as the poor, mistreated, valiant hero against whom all the evil forces of society are lashing out. And then there are those who have it out for the Conservative Republican upstate hacks who call themselves “consultants” (see the comments on Matthew’s blog).

Whatever the case, it seems the discussion of parent-teacher relationships and dynamics bring…

Just in time for March Madness

Watch this video

What did you just learn?
How can you relate it to classroom management? Deep, man. Deep.

Have you noticed that

People

really

don’t

like

As I prepare my bands for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest that is now less than a month away, I have noticed that they seem to have a big problem with rests. For the uninitiated, rests in music represent silence.

If I reduce the amount of noise that I make, my students will be more likely to hear the important things I tell them

As I was talking with one of the classes on Friday about the incredible importance of the rests, I made a correlation about how we don’t like rests because people…

Everyone’s talking about it. It seems that everyone has been talking about it for nearly seven years now. So I thought it would be kind of interesting to see what various bloggers are saying about the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 (NCLB). My personal opinion is that the law has good intentions, but they go about it entirely the wrong way.

My preference would be for children to be educated by their own families rather than the state, but California courts seem interested in doing their part to see that it doesn’t happen. Besides, too many homes have two incomes to make it reasonable for everyone (even if one income merely is there to support child care, an…

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experience I had where a student left my classroom crying and went to talk with the counselor. Read about it here. Be sure to read the comments below the article also!

Since then, I apologized. I also made the commitment to slow down my teaching style.

I wanted to take a chance to revisit that incident and follow up on some of the things that have happened since then, as well as some of the aftermath.

On the Monday morning following the weekend when I had decided to slow things down, I was amazed and surprised to see the other band director walk in just before the percussion class. I left this…

We have our first of four TAKS test days today. They seem to have increased testing security quite a bit this year over last year. In fact, we are supposed to have some monitors from the state coming to our campus at some point during the day to make sure we are doing things correctly.

I’m new at this campus, and things are run differently here than they were at the campus where I taught last year. We get to be with the students we are testing from before 8:00 to at least 2:00. We sit with the students in the cafeteria at lunch. We don’t get a conference period. It’s pretty much a wasted day as far as teaching…

On February 11th, 2007 I wrote the first blog post that is included in the archives of So You Want To Teach? I didn ‘t actually set up the blog on this domain until June, but I thought that since the blog was now over a year old (at least as far as some of the content), I’d go back and take a look at some of the old stuff. By the way, none of them have any comments at this point…
If you have a blog, you can direct some of that traffic your way simply by writing a good, thought-provoking comment

• 5 Keys To Educating People February 11, 2007
• Classroom Management: The

…

I realized some things today

• There will never be enough time to do everything I want to do
• There will never be enough money to do everything I want to do
• There will never be enough people to do everything I want to do
• The music will never sound good enough
• Kids will continue to fail their classes, no matter how important I tell them that passing is
• Parents will never be happy enough with everything I do in the classroom
• I will never be caught up on paperwork

But ya know what else I realized?
That’s part of the enjoyment of the process. If I didn’t have anything to do, I wouldn’t be necessary. Meaningless tasks…

So on Tuesday, I wrote about an incident I had where I was awfully sarcastic with a student and it upset him. I received some great comments. The conversation is continuing over there. If you haven’t chimed in, now would be a great time to do so. And better yet, subscribe to receive comments so you don’t have to keep going back to check and recheck.

So what did I do? How did I respond on Wednesday?
Well, basically, I started out the percussion class by having them all sit in a row. I got them quiet and talked with them some. I asked them what some things were that they would change.

As I expected, the most common responses…