People like to think that each essay is unique. With every new prompt, we must start from zero with a blank page and new ideas. Not so, my friend. In reality, your standard 5-paragraph essay is more like an algebra equation than a short story. You basically just need to memorize PEMDAS, and the rest is just fill-in-the-blank. I created this slideshow as a helpful visual for my students, and it’s better when explained, but I figured I’d post it here, too! Read it and write. P.

When I was a middle school history teacher, I sometimes felt like my class wasn’t as “important” as the others. The insecure corner of my brain told me that math and science were the future, whereas my stories of pyramids and oracles were fun, but useful only in teaching kids “how to learn.” The rapid development of AI has changed everything, and it’s not hyperbolic to say the consequences of failing to recognize that are a matter of life-or-death. Humans Can’t Compete To be

Between books, I’ve made the unfortunate decision to start reading more news. It’s a horrible habit that rarely improves one’s quality of life, but it gets me fired up and wanting to give my two cents on certain issues. School choice is one of them, particularly since it’s shaping up to be a major point of contention in the coming election cycle. For those unfamiliar, school choice describes the proposal to “give parents state money to send their kids to schools outside of t

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we have a major problem. Our education system is an incoherent hodgepodge of asinine theories, and the result is squandering millions of lives of potential. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today…we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the National Commission on Excellence in Education noted back in 1983. 40 years later, little has changed. U

Psst...Definitions for words in bold can be found at the bottom of the post. Depending on how current events- savvy you are, you may have heard talk of inflation lately. But…what is inflation, exactly? And what do you need to know about it? Basically, inflation is when your expenses go up faster than your purchasing power. I’m not talking about expenses going up because you went on a spending spree. Inflation is when the same items become more expensive in back-to-back ye

As you get older, people might try to get you to invest in things, buy certain products, etc. Sometimes they attempt to prove their legitimacy is by sharing their past year’s revenue. I see this a lot with online courses, actually! People try to tell you they’re a good teacher because they had X million in revenue last year, and they can teach you how to do it, too! But here’s the problem: a person’s revenue is irrelevant unless their PROFIT is also high. People tend to th