Greetings,

What's in it for me? That's a question we all ask when sitting in front of a teacher or speaker or someone who is taking upour time. It is also a question your students ask themselves constantly, and if you can't provide a strong answer, you can bet that you're going to have attention and discipline problems in the classroom.

So much of classroom discipline deals with keeping student in line through incentives, consequences and other techniques....

Being an observer in a classroom can be extremely enlightening or extremely frustrating. Students can be engaged in learning or engaged in what they are currently playing with in their desks. Unfortunately when a teacher is trying to teach 20 or more students at one time, that task may seem almost impossible because he or she is attempting to maneuver content, control large behaviors, and keep all students learning at the same speed.

How can new teachers be prepared for the challenges of the urban classroom? College professor Dave Weiss, who taught for more than 30 years in Chicago, offers some personal suggestions in this week's Pulse blog post.
Some school districts have already instituted a one-year student teaching program. This allows the novice to experience the practicalities of beginning the first day of school and the end of the school year. This would be an excellent program if instituted...

Imagine, knowing that your birthday would always fall on the same day each and every year. Would it be helpful if you knew that all holidays would also be celebrated on the same day? Our current calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, has been used for 450 years. Two professors at John Hopkins University think we need a new calendar. Their calendar would eliminate all leap years, which are added ever 4 years to keep our 365.2422 day year from getting our calendar out of sorts. With the...