Resources and Templates

Yesterday, I did not like my lesson planned for US History. Not in the "this is boring but necessary content" way that we have to march through content. This was in the "I taught this to one section yesterday, and it was painful for everyone in the room" level of dislike. The lesson landed with a resounding thud for everyone to hear, because the classroom was dead silent with boredom. During the 90 minutes of my planning period before seeing a different section of the same c

This may look similar to last Monday's post. I had several people reach out and ask for some additional steps or context on how I built the structure of my Claude project space. Also, the World History resource page is LIVE!!!!!! Every August I tell myself this will be the year I stay ahead of my own lesson plans instead of writing them at 10pm the night before. This year I tried something different. Before I planned a single lesson for tenth grade Modern World History, I s

The first two days of school are a negotiation. Students are figuring out who you are. You are figuring out who they are. Everyone is performing slightly more than they will for the rest of the year: students performing compliance, teachers performing authority, while the actual relationship that will make learning possible has not yet been established. I have been teaching for twenty years. I have done the syllabus reading, the procedure walk-through, the icebreaker where ev

Checking in from a still-being-organized Room 288, the new home of the plAIground! When I wrote the Year Zero post back in June, I made a promise. . Everything I build gets shared. Two dedicated resource pages: one for US History, one for World History, updated as the year goes on. Not a highlight reel of the things that worked perfectly. Everything! It's August. I'm in my 2nd of 4 days of PD, and I see students for the first time on Thursday! Before the madness of Day 1 of Y

Every year, approximately two million high school seniors sit down to answer one of the most absurd questions in American education. In 650 words or fewer, tell us who you are, what has shaped you, what you have learned from your greatest challenge, and why you are worth our investment. Please be specific. Please be authentic. Please be compelling. Please do not sound like the other two million people doing this exact same thing. You have until January. The college applicatio

I have a therapist. She is wonderful. She is patient. She is exactly the kind of calm, grounded professional that someone with an anxiety disorder and a panic disorder probably needs in their corner. She also spent the better part of two years trying to get me to find my mind palace. For those unfamiliar, a mind palace is a meditation and visualization technique where you imagine a physical space: a house, a castle, a familiar building, and use it as a mental anchor for relax

We are eight posts into this series! What a wild ride it has been! Eight posts, somewhere north of twenty thinking routines. A Costco parking lot, a Tonic deep cut, This Old House, a soup can, and one very passionate argument about the Oxford comma. We have covered routines that teach students to observe carefully, argue honestly, find their words, push past their first thought, sit in complexity, see before they interpret, and document how far their thinking has traveled. An

I've always been fond of a good 'ol home renovation show. It's something that actually is deeply rooted in my childhood. Long before the days of brothers who had property or uppers that needed to be fixed, there was one show I would watch on the regular with my dad. This. Old. House. Not only would I watch our local PBS station to see what Bob, Norm, Richard, Tom, and Roger were up to, but my dad also collected the books, the plans, the suggested gear. Unlike the modern home

Brief Update! Oh man, nothing like getting injured and sick as heck in the last 10 days of school. For the first time in AGES, I had to leave school last week because I fell physically ill (after making it to my second-floor classroom on crutches nonetheless! But, I'm back to about 90%, we've got 3.5 days until summer, so here are some fun updates before we get to today's wacky template! Job change! Two weeks ago, I found out that I'm staying in the same school, but transit

There is a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial that lives rent-free in my brain. It is one of those commercial gems that then morphs into other shower-thought style derivations. You probably know the one. Two people walking toward each other, completely oblivious. One has chocolate. One has peanut butter. They collide. And the result is the greatest food combination in the history of human civilization. It is, when you think about it, a missed connection that actually connec

Almost 30 years ago (in July, 1996)...(god I'm old)...one of the most underrated bands of all time released their debut album Lemon Parade. The third single, released in February of 97, is what created a core musical memory for me. The song opens with its title and perfect follow-up statement: If you could only see the way she loves me, then maybe you would understand, why I feel this way about our love, and what I must do. Tonic's "If You Could Only See" is the perfect argum

Last Monday, I shared the GoFundMe in the Ditch That Textbook online community. (You should definitely join!!!) When I shared it, I described it as "an off-the-rails idea for a 'social media' template," and a "shower thought meets asking Claude some questions meets Canva during my plan." I expected some nice engagement. Maybe a few teachers saying they'd try it. What I did not expect was for the community to hand me two more ideas before the day was over. That is the thing ab

I want to tell you about the worst argument I have ever witnessed at a Thanksgiving dinner table. It was not about politics. It was not about religion. It was about a parking spot. My father, a man who is, in most other contexts, a perfectly reasonable human being, spent forty-five minutes constructing an airtight legal, moral, and philosophical case for why he had been wronged in a Costco parking lot three weeks prior. He had witnesses. He had a diagram. He had, I am not exa

As you may have noticed, I've continued combing the wide world of the internet to find social media and/or website templates to manipulate into a tool for students to showcase their content mastery. While I've typically grabbed "safe" websites that feel like they have an obvious connection, today's is something that came at me from thinking a little sideways . Here is how this one started. I was brainstorming with Claude this morning, which, if you have been reading this blog

We are four posts into this series now, and I want to take a second to zoom out. Post One was about giving students the tools to recognize that they're already thinking. Post Two was about teaching them to slow down and notice things... really notice them, the way you notice a piece of art differently on the second look than the first. Post Three was about helping students find their words ; about the gap between having a thought and being able to actually say it out l

Let me tell you something about my office. It is covered in Funko Pops. Floor to ceiling, shelf to shelf, every available surface. I have lost count of how many I own, but the number is somewhere north of embarrassing and south of intervention. My classroom alone has roughly thirty of them staring at my students every single day — a silent, big-eyed audience for every lesson I teach. My office in February, before my recent reorganization, there are now more, and it looks craz

How many of us can relate to the following situation? Last year, I was teaching a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, and we had just finished reading a primary source, a firsthand account from a Freedom Rider. Heavy stuff. Important stuff. The kind of stuff that you want students to genuinely sit with. So I asked the class what they thought. Silence . Not the good kind of silence. Not the "I am processing something profound" silence. The "I have not been given a single tool t

Let me tell you something that will either deeply resonate with you or make you close this tab immediately. I think about thinking. Like... a lot. Embarrassingly a lot. From reading philosophy and psychology texts, to staring into the void and wondering why my silly "lizard brain" likes to do things. It's all thinking about thinking (think-ception!?!?!?!?). My thinking about thinking runs so wild that when I'm in the middle of the grocery store buying soup, it becomes a whole

About a month ago , I shared some social media templates both inspired by and missing from the epic collection amassed at Matt Miller's Ditch That Textbook Website . If you missed that post, there's a dating profile template, a Nextdoor template, and an Instagram profile page, all free and fully editable to use with your students! As I was looking through my collection of templates I've used to simulate group conversation...I noticed a void that existed. I think finding a w

In 2008, American rock band Vampire Weekend shook the world by asking one simple question... " Who gives a F$%K about an Oxford Comma?" and my brain immediately thought two things: I do... What does the Oxford Comma feel about this song? I cannot be the only person who asks hard-hitting questions like this. I definitely know that I'm not the only one who has conversations with inanimate objects frequently. Do you think I sound a little crazy? If you've ever bumped into a pie