People who study memory know that drawing a picture is one of the best ways to remember something. But how often do history teachers use this powerful memory tool with their students? Most of us don’t do it often enough. An intentional use of student-generated images can help students to remember important historical events much... Continue Reading →

Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? These practices of interpretation are certainly on display in many classrooms, where students learn to exercise their moral and intellectual prowess by dismantling what... Continue Reading →

Even the deepest-seeming change – to the grammar – never destroys the language system. Some distinctions can disappear: classical Arabic has singular, dual and plural number; the modern dialects mostly use just singular and plural, like English. Latin was full of cases; its daughter languages – French, Spanish and so on – lack them, but... Continue Reading →

Alanna Kotler. eJewishPhilanthropy. College Admissions and “Measuring” Students: A Different Approach for Day Schools. As the pressures of college admission weigh on teachers and students alike, the way we teach at the upper levels becomes more about students’ transcripts than the real-world, relevant work students could be doing, or perhaps already are. As I have... Continue Reading →

Taking Info Literacy to a whole new level in high schools. There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the... Continue Reading →