"Mr. Johnson, why do we use pencils?"  Cynical Gifted Boy asks. "It's a learning tool.  Why do we learn?"  I ask h...

I read a kid's plog today.  It was a free write where he described how horribly bored he was while writing. For a piece about boredom, i...

A student ran to me this morning and explained, "Mr. Johnson, someone wrote something really mean on our plog." I looked at the ...

I overheard a conversation a few days back (yes, I eavesdrop on my students) about the pen pal networks. "I only have twenty follower...

For the most part, I abandon the worksheets.  We breeze through them quickly and then I break students up into small groups to discuss the q...

The first time I allowed pencil-based research, I assumed kids would understand how to look at the bias in a source, figure out the facts an...

Six graders snicker at the word plog. It sounds dirty, not in our Victorian sense, but in that innocent sense that you expect twelve year o...

A man rides his carriage up to the playground and stops the horses.  He pulls out a hand-cranked, ultra-portable, larger-than-the-cosmos pho...

So, it's the second day of our one-to-one pencil to student unit.  I'm teaching a financial planning / economics unit and incorporat...

games are great, I'm sure, but I want students to use pencils for things like budgets I'm going to be honest here.  When I first be...

A Language Arts teacher pulls me aside, "Mr. Johnson, I'm concerned about your former sixth graders.  Did you teach them how to wri...