The Deep-Seated Problems With Public Education

In case you haven’t already seen it, this post of teacher misbehavior caught on cell phones from Dangerously Irrelevant has been making the rounds. I saw it on Seth Godin’s blog, of all places. Seth’s assessment is that the teachers have a marketing problem. Cam Beck thinks the problem is deeper than simply marketing. He … Read more

February 2007

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 … Read more

Hyper-Focus Fosters Higher Quality Output

Get your commenting skills ready, there’s lots of material to be discussed here. I will be offline for most of this coming week and would love to hear the thoughts of my readers on these subjects. This week, I will be traveling to San Antonio for the annual Texas Music Educators Association clinic and convention. … Read more

Why I Hated Teaching During My First Two Years

Newby writes: I have noticed lately in a couple of your posts you mentioned how terrible your first couple of years of teaching were. As a new reader, I have gone back into your archived information to learn more about this blog but have not come across why you had such a hard time. What … Read more

Ask Joel

Lately, I have noticed a larger number of prospective and newer teachers leaving comments to my various articles. This has helped inspire me to offer what advice I can in a (hopefully) weekly question and answer forum. For lack of creativity, we’ll call it “Ask Joel” and begin next week. Any question is fair game, … Read more

Update: Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight

My recent tutorial, Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight, has been featured as one of 71 tutorials in Daniel’s Blog Writing Project at Daily Blog Tips. Daily Blog Tips has over 8,500 subscribers and is among the top 500 blogs in Technorati’s ratings. If you wanted to help me out by going to the site, … Read more

100 MusEduBloggers by 2009

I have been blogging about teaching for a while. I came across a post by Joseph Pisano (the original post is here) where he is trying to get at least 100 Music Education Bloggers blogging about music education or music technology. Part of me has been wanting to jump into the MusEduBlogging world, but it … Read more

Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight

This article is part of a Group Writing Project about Building RSS Numbers. I recently achieved the milestone of having 150 subscribers (I’m still hanging out in that area). In reaching that, I realize that many bloggers use Blogger to host their blogs and FeedBurner for their RSS syndication. That’s a good combination (I much … Read more

Loving My Job; Hating My Work

Even if you ignore the majority of this article, check out the last sentence. I am absolutely loving school since coming back from Christmas Break. Even so, I am beginning to get burned out. If you want to know why, go read this. He’s still not back yet and it’s all but certain that he … Read more