Writing

Karen’s Essay/Commentary from Cogniscenti/WBUR: “We owe teenagers company in their uncertainty, including the companionship of poets whose inclination to question and observe the human condition mirrors their own. We owe them time spent with language in its highest form, especially now.”

Photo: (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

The couple who lived on the farm a half-mile away came to check on us; they’d heard our screams and raced over. The scene of them pulling up the gravel driveway in their pickup truck made me think of an article I’d recently read about how dolphins and bats use echolocation to send signals to one another, sometimes over vast distances.

Asking students a series of essential questions at the start of a course signals that deep engagement is a requirement. (Published on Edutopia)

The odd bird teacher is, I fear, on the brink of extinction. And I worry about the kind of place school will be when there are no more Mr. Nugents or Mr. Sullivans. What kind of teacher will take their place?

As any parent who’s looked on in relief as their kid plows through the Harry Potter series can tell you, there’s nothing like a well-told story to teach kids about hard stuff…but our kids had outgrown Harry Potter.

We give each other the benefit of the doubt here. We assume good intentions. We know each other. And that makes it okay for both kids and teachers to take risks, sometimes mess up, and apologize to each other.

A curriculum I wrote for the Unitarian Universalist Association’s robust youth education program. (2004). The challenge was to create workshops that were communal, hands-on, project-based, grounded in the values of the UUA, user-friendly, and didn’t feel “like school.”