What follows are some reflections based on my notes from the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union strike where I served as my school’s strike captain. On our eleven days on the picket line, we sang, danced, ate, and engaged in conversation punctuated by honking cars and trucks, and the occasional middle finger angrily aimed in our…
Tag: teaching
Student Motivation
This pandemic year has, broadly speaking, had a pretty significant impact on student motivation to learn, and particularly to complete assignments. When I check in with students, I often hear, “I’m just not motivated right now, Mr. Rolnick.” While finding the motivation to complete schoolwork has always been a challenge for some of my students,…
Student Views on Grades and Grading
Anyone who has spent time in the classroom has probably given a lot of thought to what a grade represents and anguished over the grading process. Yesterday I wrote about failing in the remote learning context, and briefly discussed grades and grading as part of that. Today I figured I’d go a little deeper into…
Writing for 10 days
One idea I’ve been working around as I complete 10 days of writing 700+ words a day of [roughly edited but intended to be legible] ideas is that writing isn’t actually that hard, but generating novel, interesting or worthwhile ideas is a big part of the challenge. Journaling for myself is focused more on debriefing…
Climate Change and Social Studies
A couple of years ago at the start of the academic year, I utilized climate change as a case study to understanding how power functions, as well as how political issues look different at different levels of analysis (community, local, national, regional, international, global). It turned out to be one of the most energizing starts…
Teaching about Africa
I don’t know how to teach about Africa, and yet it must be done. That might be a surprising admission for someone who lived on the continent for three years, who has studied, wrote about, and talked about Botswana, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Somalia, South Africa, and Tanzania in some depth, and seriously considered…
Remote learning
Teachers across the United States, and probably much of the world, will tell you that this year has been one like none other, and they are not exaggerating. What many of us now take as normal – a virtual room full of student avatars, varied uses of synchronous and asynchronous time, participating in the chat…