Antonio was a genuine, square-one beginner when I met him in my English as a New Language class in September. He was on time, seated up straight in the front row, smiling. He had been in this country for just weeks and he was clearly ready to learn. But was I ready to teach him?


Do not tell me my students cannot do math — and don’t let me tell myself that, either.

As a first-year teacher, any concerns I had about teaching students so close to my age faded during a recent discussion about "The Great Gatsby" in my 11th-grade English class.

Art and music are the things we make when we want to tell the world that we are people. And expressing our humanity through music and art is what makes everything else worth it.

He always came late. He sat in the back of the classroom. Alone, alert, quiet and reflective, he pulled out his pens and books. But his pens did not write our class notes. His books were not our books. Instead, he began to draw.

At the beginning of the summer, I was in high spirits. I had just finished my first year of teaching and was told that I would be teaching all 7th-grade science classes for the upcoming year. Aside from the fact that I adore 7th-graders (awkwardness and all), I was also looking forward to having just one curriculum to prepare and teach.

Teaching Ethan Canin's "The Palace Thief" has renewed my faith in English literature being an avenue to develop emotional maturity in my students.

Every new teacher will go through myriad emotions as they set out on their journeys. But it is joy that new teachers should wait for with bated breath.

Interesting word definitions, based on the perspective of a teacher in her first year on the job.

The education reform movement has an obsessive adherence to rigidly structured lesson plans, bewildering algorithms to quantify teacher effectiveness and the relentless collection and analysis of student data. But in my second year of teaching, I’ve come to realize that a true education is messy — gloriously messy, like a Kandinsky painting.