If teaching feels harder than it should, you’re not imagining it.
This podcast is for teachers who are doing everything they’ve been told to do. And still feeling stuck. We talk about what’s actually happening in classrooms right now, and what you can do about it.
If you’ve ever thought:
I’m doing everything right, so why isn’t this working?
My students like me, but they still won’t do the work
I’m exhausted and not sure what to change
You’re in the right place.
New here? Start with one of these.
These are the conversations teachers come back to again and again.
I’ve been trying to implement Free Read Friday with my students. I give my seventh graders ten to fifteen minutes to read whatever they want. No skill to pull out, no worksheet, just a book. It should be the simplest part of my week. Instead, it turned into the most chaotic ten minutes I’ve had all year.
It’s the beginning of October. The back-to-school adrenaline is gone, grades are due, and the workdays that used to be for finishing them are now professional learning days. I know teachers who are thinking about taking a personal day to grade. If that’s you, this encore episode of If Teachers Ruled the World is for you. Teacher exhaustion in October isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong.
My first year of teaching, a student came at me to hit me. Other students held him back. And for the first and only time in 26 years, I seriously thought about using the Georgia law that lets teachers remove disruptive students from her classroom. So why do so few teachers ever use it, even when classrooms are harder than they’ve ever been?
A screen check during a digital test showed me something I couldn’t unsee: a student answer that clearly wasn’t in that student’s own words, and no way to actually prove it. That frustration is at the center of this episode. I’m talking about teaching synthesis skills in the age of AI, and why summary, the thing we’ve spent years teaching kids to do well, was never actually the goal.
Every teacher knows this job is immense. So many demands coming at us from all directions. But…and hear me out…what if self-imposed deadlines teachers put on their own plates are adding to the noise. In this episode, I discuss teacher perfectionism, burnout, setting boundaries as a teacher, and my favorite–how to make stress your friend (seriously). You don’t want to miss this one.
Lessons are taking longer this year, and it’s not just you. There’s a connection between AI and student attention spans. We’re using 2024 research on how this generation of students learns differently to makes the case for why scaffolding versus rigor is a false choice. The real answer is teaching up while providing the support kids need to get there, even when that support takes more time and energy than we’d like.