A happy tale from a Common Core classroom

Lyn Cannaday, a 16-year veteran high school English teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, recently took to the pages of Education Week to detail her experiences implementing the Common Core State Standards in her classroom. Though not without its challenges, she writes, using the Common Core has helped her students better appreciate and understand the fiction they read precisely because it is paired with related informational texts. Her positive experience is … Read more »

A Very Peculiar God: Reading Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

On March 4, 1865—just a month before Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox—Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. Invoking theological speculation and quoting Scripture, he offered an interpretation of the meaning of the war, which enabled him to summon Americans to a new and more difficult public purpose. In this essay, Caitrin Nicol, managing editor of The New Atlantis, reveals the depths of Lincoln’s address.

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Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month, which has its origins in the first national Women’s Day in 1909. Four years after the first Women’s Day, on March 3, 1913—the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration—5,000 women marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the US Capitol demanding the right to vote. It was the first civil rights parade to use the Capitol as a backdrop, and it kept the issue of women’s … Read more »

Teachers, technology and the classroom

A new study just released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project takes a look at how teachers are using technology in their classrooms. The survey sampled 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers and found that teachers generally report that digital technologies have helped them in teaching their middle school and high school students, but that technologies like the Internet, mobile phones, and social media … Read more »

Upcoming professional development opportunities

For teachers looking for summer professional development opportunities, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has some great conferences and workshops coming up. Some courses are online, while others are held at places like the National Archives in Washington, DC or at Brandman University in Monterey, CA. Here’s a listing of some of these opportunities:

Common Core controversy

Over at the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog, Valerie Strauss has just reprinted three different opinion pieces about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Though nearly all of the states and the District of Columbia have adopted the CCSS in English language arts and math, as states prepare to implement them in their schools, there has been a growing distrust of and resistance to such implementation. As Strauss notes, reasons for … Read more »

Aristotle’s ethics and American government

Over at the Washington, Jefferson & Madison Institute’s blog, Tony Williams, the Institute’s program director, takes a look at the influence of classical political thought on the American founders. He pays particular attention to Aristotle’s conception of politics and human happiness found in the Nicomachean Ethics, noting that “Aristotle’s vision of a well-ordered republic of free, virtuous individuals shaped the founding and should inform our discussion of the duties … Read more »