My sister gave me the book Street Gang, a history of Sesame Street, and I love how it has made me think about the GIANT collection of people and talent that collaborated to bring the dream of good television for young kids to life.

In the past couple years I have read/ watched/ listened to books and films about some of the most important media in my life, The Muppets, Mister Rogers, and Sesame Street. This has helped me see the much bigger picture of the mission and women and men behind each of these amazing projects.

The groundwork, research…

When I look at my schooling, I would say it failed me because it was supposed to “prepare me for life” and help me “leave imagination and fancy behind.” This was not for lack of trying, I was a resilient dreamer and I was cynical about schooling by 6th grade.

I loved topics like science, but I struggled in the classes. I would read ahead in class in the text book. The teacher saw this as “off task,” while I was really running my own advanced tutorial.

I am at a tipping point in my teaching timeline, soon I will…

A Teacher’s Guide to Action: We’ve Trumped Ourselves

A teacher’s job, and we do so imperfectly, is to help students learn how to become productive and engaged members of society. To help them navigate through noise and opinion to truth, to help them learn to care for others.

America is hurting after this 2016 election and there is plenty of blame and bad feelings to go around. What concerns me most is that some 49% of the adults who could have voted didn’t. They choose not to. …

The Done and Unfinished

“But what about the movie I didn’t finish making last time?” — I reply “You won’t finish it this time either.”

When I taught English we finished what we started, pathologically. If we started a book we read all of it, and then re-read it. Sometimes we would recreate parts of the book in different forms just to be really thorough.

As a Makerspace teacher, I start more things than get finished. Some projects get truncated. This is pretty common. …