ERIN SPONAUGLE

Silly season is officially upon us, and your supplies are feeling it. Here's how to get through the rest of the year with your materials and your sanity mostly intact.You know what nobody told you when you decided to become a teacher? That one day you'd watch a kid casually snap a brand new colored pencil in half, stare directly at you, and then shrug. And you'd have to decide in real time whether to address it or just keep teaching because you have fourteen more things to co

First of all, everybody is tired. Your students, their parents, your coworkers, you. The third quarter of the school year tends to be when the heaviest content is taught, and the most work is piled on, which means kids who are already struggling to keep up are hitting a wall right about now. When someone is overloaded and their executive function is running on fumes, things come out of their mouths that probably shouldn't. We're not that different, honestly. We just have

When our students don't do their work, we can't see what they know. We can't give them feedback. We can't tell if they're ready for the next level of content, and we can't make the professional judgment we're being paid to make about their progress. That's frustrating on a purely practical level. few things in the classroom will get to you faster than planning a solid lesson, designing an assignment that actually gives you something to work with, and then watching the work n

Teachers can't be the only ones our students learn from. Standing up there every day, pouring everything we know into a room full of kids while they absorb it passively from their seats, or worse, from their iPads, is a fast track to being completely emptied out by October. Cooperative learning shifts that dynamic. When students work together, they teach each other, and sometimes they are honestly better at teaching certain things to one another than we are.

But here we are. We’re getting ready to start a new semester, and today I want to talk about something that always feels bigger than people admit: transitioning back into school after break and setting our students and ourselves up for a stronger second half of the year. If you're feeling a little sad or anxious about going back right now, I want you to hear this first: that feeling doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It actually makes a lot of sense. Over the past

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