It’s 2011, and I’ve just finished my first year of teaching when over the summer I hop on the little portal that will show me how well I did.  I taught an AP® course, among other courses, which for those of you who don’t know stands for Advanced Placement® and is a nation-wide curriculum and testing program run by CollegeBoard.  At the end of every year, students take a test on the entire course’s material and can earn college credit - it’s a big deal for many students and certainly for the adults who teach them.

The test is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with all public universities accepting a 3 for the equivalent of one college course in the field they tested.  Then at private universities students can earn even more credit with higher scores.

Welp, I hopped on that portal and saw that my average student score was a 3.1.  Not bad for a 22 year old teaching AP® Psychology for the first time and only ever having taken a...

At the time that this post will publish we are a day out from a well deserved break as we approach Thanksgiving.  Five days of no virtual or in-person school, no students to manage or lessons to plan.

And yet, many of us are looking at working at least one full day of break, if not most of the break.  We just have so much to catch up on, and, if we're honest, 5 days of a break is a good amount of time to get a head start on planning for the future so it's not so overwhelming when we're back in the classroom.

The truth is, as teachers, we can justify working until the cows come home.  We are doing important work not for the improvement of ourselves, but for that of our students.  And if we can make their education a well organized and well orchestrated experience then we are doing something right in the world.

For this reason, this week and in a few coming weeks we'll be focusing on the Teacher Health Series that we published earlier in the year, way back before...