This one has been on my to-read list basically since it came out. I knew I admired her for her stance on education (and her willingness to be so vocal at such a young age), but I didn’t know much about her beyond that, or much about her home. This is a really interesting book for someone like me, who is not familiar with Pakistan, or at least not familiar with it beyond what gets reported in the U.S. media. If you look up images […]
Just Another Reason Why Legislators Shouldn’t be Educators
I’ve been working my way through Kelly Gallagher’s cannon and this is my latest read, Readicide: How Schools are Killing reading and What You Can do about It. It’s a great analysis of the reasons why reading scores have fallen even though a lot of legislation has gone into trying to make the U.S. more competitive on the global education scale. In fact, much of Gallagher’s reasons harmonizes with two books I’ve already read and reviewed, so it wasn’t too much of a shock the […]
Reading in the Wild
With only a week to go until school starts, I’ve been frantically trying to prepare myself for the changes I want to make in my classroom. As I mentioned in my post about The Book Whisperer, I want to incorporate more reading in my classroom and make the assignments and assessments more authentic. Instead of teaching books to students, I want to teach the students through books. Thankfully, Donalyn Miller followed up her work in The Book Whisperer with a book that breaks down the […]
Where Was This Book Five Years Ago?
A book hasn’t whipped me into a fervor of action like Book Whisperer in quite some time. But I’m glad it did. And the thing is, it’s not like the author, Donalyn Miller, has presented me with some unknown truth. Instead, she’s asked some tough questions and challenged me to get down to the heart of the matter. To teach reading, students have to read. Truth bomb. Of course by now you’re thinking, Chancellor, that shouldn’t be a surprise. You’re an English teacher after all. […]