See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden

Mr. Teachbad is hilarious, and he’s frustrated about the same things you are. He has a talent for writing exactly what you need to hear after a bad day, and though he’s tight-lipped about his identity and location, don’t be surprised if you feel like he works in your district.

Smaller, softer, and cheaper… just the way you want it! Here’s a link. As always, online bookseller reviews are appreciated.

Before you begin a teaching career, you watch movies like “Freedom Writers” and think Hilary Swank’s character will be you one day. You will reach the students others have given up on, hand them composition notebooks, and deliver a speech about how they haven’t failed school—school has failed them. And then, as they share their life stories with you in complete, articulate sentences, they will realize they finally have a teacher who cares about them, and they’ll see that learning can be fun, because you’ll relate the lessons to their lives….

You know what comes next, right? Sigh. Read the rest of the article on Teacher Magazine’s Website. for some bitter refreshingly honest thoughts on teaching in frustrating challenging times.

My third guest blog on Rick Hess Straight Up compares the value of district-mandated professional development on “best practices” with just going to happy hour with other teachers. Guess which one wins?

My second blog for Rick Hess Straight Up explains why televised “town hall” meetings often leave teachers feeling frustrated. (Hint, good teaching doesn’t always translate to good TV.) Plus, five tips for teachers on speaking in front of the media successfully.

In this guest post for Rick Hess Straight Up, I mentioned a teacher who created extra materials for a district-mandated “best practice” in which students write their own test questions based on fill-in-the-blank “question task cards.” You may have correctly guessed that I was the teacher involved. (Perhaps the slightly bitter tone gave it away?) Below are the materials.

This is the first of three guest blogs for Rick Hess Straight Up, a blog that discusses education policy, reform, and research. In this post, I offer a translation guide so that edu-decision makers can understand how phrases like, “Failure is not an option!” sound to people who work in schools where failure is, indeed an option (despite the “Failure is not an option!” poster hanging over the door of the front office).

The Learning First Alliance is a permanent partnership of 16 leading education associations with more than 10 million members dedicated to improving student learning in America’s public schools. I am a long-time fan of, and now a proud contributor to the LFA blog.

Click here to read my guest post, Teacher Advice: The Good, the Bad, and, “That Would Never Happen in MY Class.”

I’ve always wished some of my favorite authors would print lists like this one, but I only have control over my number-one favorite author, Roxanna Elden. The following is a list of books I read and enjoyed while writing “See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers.”

Education Next is an education journal based out of Harvard University. It specializes in “presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice (without fear or favor) to worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments.”

And they let me write this article about test prep:

While reviewing a practice passage called “The Night Hunters” for last year’s 9th-grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), I had to peek at the teachers’ guide to check my answer to this question: Which of the owls’ names is the most misleading?

I was stuck between (F) the screech owl, because its call rarely approximates a screech, and (I) the long-eared owl, because its real ears are behind its eyes and covered by feathers. The passage explains that owls hear through holes behind their eyes, so the term long-eared owl seemed misleading. Then again, a screech owl that rarely screeches? That is pretty misleading, too.

Click here to read the rest of the article (and learn the answer to the owl question) at EducationNext.Org.