After volunteering and teaching in public schools for fifteen years, I think I've finally begun to see why more public funds aren't dedicated to schools, to teaching, and to teachers. First, the ruling class doesn't really want to have an educated, innovative, critical thinking populace in our country, because it perceives that it might threaten its, or its children's, power. Meanwhile, the ruling class can afford to send its kids to private/independent schools that don't use nationally-mandated standardized tests and standards designed to cripple a good teacher's creativity and discredit her perceptions of what her students need most. Accordingly, many public school classrooms have been reduced to mere conditioning cells for the children of the middle and under classes.

Second, the teaching profession in the USA seems to be designed—consciously or unconsciously—to attract many of the society's most intelligent, caring, charismatic, capable, and powerful women, and then systematically trap them in a job that's nearly impossible (i.e., getting every child to pass the standardized tests while providing them the intellectual, emotional, ethical, and physical nurturing and discipline they need in myriad other ways), so that these very women are so occupied trying to save the future of our culture—our children—that they cannot spend any time or energy working to change the many corrupt or otherwise harmful structures in our present society.

Teachers spend much of their day isolated from their peers, much like in a prison cell, and some end up playing prison warden more than pedagogue. Many teachers see the essential importance of education, and work there because it's simply "the right thing to do." Just make sure you're engaged before you start teaching, because once you're reading book reports all weekend, you can kiss your dating life goodbye. My hat's off to all those amazing teachers who keep going back each year.

Poor Child Left Behind—Bone-chilling news for teachers and anyone who loves education. Who benefits most from NCLB? Who's behind the NCLB Act?

THE MAKING HISTORY PROJECT

INTRODUCTION

Making History is a classroom humanities simulation wherein students, grades four and up, undertake the challenge of building a rich culture or civilization from scratch. Each simulated society begins with relatively few technological skills, similar to the way early humans lived tens of thousands of years ago. During the four to seven month duration of the project, the simulation traverses thousands of years of cultural complexity and brings some of the civilizations into a bronze age. The challenge of the simulation is to cooperate as a team: to create and develop a rich culture; to work with specific and limited natural resources; to trade and interact with other societies; and to research, invent, and document the whole development in journals. The students celebrate their achievements and conclude the project with a presentation of traditional foods, stories, dances, and ceremonies developed by their truly unique societies.

Read about the history of Making History.

Some of the guiding questions the Making History Project addresses.

Graphic index to links to sites addressing prehistoric and ancient technologies, traditions, and resources here.

LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHING RESOURCES

Download the latest copy of my Style Guide for Middle School Students here, as a pdf.

The "Golden Page" of transition words and classical word elements to keep on file, or in memory, through college.

ORIGINAL, AND VERY FUN, PLAYGROUND GAMES

Download the handwritten rules for the Insiders/Outsiders (a.k.a., Sieze the Castle) one-flag version of Capture the Flag here, as a pdf.