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"If we continue to treat our teachers like children, what will become of our children?" Although this article is very confrontational, it does offer some solution-focused thinking. Teachers should be pushing our profession in these ways--prompting dialogue and debate among our communities and our faculties. 

If you're tired of printing documents generated during meetings with parents or colleagues just so that you can sign, scan, and resend them give Hello Sign a try.

Tired of being a Twitter transcriptionist at conventions? Consider taking visual notes instead.

"Educators normally plan their lessons out in advance, and teach subjects and related topics on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Is it almost time for your topic for the week? If you have a normal approach that you're growing tired of, need more engagement from students, or want to improve your teaching style for the new year, using video is an exciting way to get information across."

"Research has shown that teenagers don't get enough sleep at night and go to school tired. Some experts believe the cause is biological. Others believe that teenagers stay up late because of adolescent distractions. Early high school start times can also contribute to teens' tiredness. This article will explore possible causes and solutions to this problem."

"Evidence suggests that teenagers are indeed seriously sleep deprived. A recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that 60% of children under the age of 18 complained of being tired during the day, according to their parents, and 15% said they fell asleep at school during the year."

Tired of delivering the typical stream of status updates on TwitterTwitter? Why not try some of the following ideas for other things you can do with the

Interactive. Test your tires while drivng on dry or wet pavement and trying to stop.

Use Prezi to add drama and sophistication to all your presentations. Prezi is an online application that takes the place of tired slideshows. You get to use your creativity and work with a variety of different media formats. But first, discover Prezi shortcuts, set up paths, and how to navigate its main menu. This Cheat Sheet shows you how.

A college professor on five things he never tires of telling his students about writing.

Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent

We've written a book for teachers who are tired of teaching to the test and want to get access to their students' creative potential. It's a writing book that is actually meant to be read; it's a pedagogy based on how we come to know the world and how we learn to confront the unknown. Available for free 7 day download at Amazon. We're having a book launch party at the MLA16 in Austin, Jan 9, 10AM Bedford Booth. Come talk about creativity and curiosity with us. Book launch at the upcoming #MLA16 in Austin

life

A Pew Research Center study from 2010 reported that more than four out of five teens with cellphones sleep with the phone on or near the bed, sometimes falling asleep with it in their hands in the middle of a conversation.

I define a rule as what you enforce every time it's broken. Platitudes cannot be enforced because there is no line to cross, there's nothing predictable for students to understand, and they're too vague to be useful. In essence, these clumps allow teachers to enforce anything whenever they want under any conditions they chose. It's a get into jail free card. Rules aren't reduced by clumping them -- they are only hidden from students. Often, the only way students can find the real lines is by crossing them. This encourages rule breaking rather than stopping it.

I find, however, that if you inundate students with rules and consequences, especially when they are the same rules every time, students view these as your expectations of their behavior. When they believe you expect the worst from them, they will rise to that expectation. Many rules teachers make are actually procedures, as defined by Henry Wong. If we teach procedures instead, and simply reteach the procedure every time it is not followed, they eventually get tired of being retaught the procedure and just do it. I think what some in education forget is that students, no matter what age, expect and deserve respect, too. If we consistently offer respect and dignity, even when we aren't receiving it in return, the rest of the class notices and responds in return. There need to be some rules that are clearly stated with real enforceable consequences. They need to be only a few and very important. Every professional work place has a few. But we also need to send the clear message that school, as preparing them for the workplace that will not have a100 page rule book, is where we are showing them a model of behavior that is *implicitly* expected in every segment of society.

"Because so many educators have come to believe the myth of "the fewer rules, the better" (which I was taught in my teacher training program), they have developed what I call deception clumps. They throw as many rules as possible into a respectably titled non-communicative clump: "

I get very tired of having people point to Singapore as a good model for education. Singaporeans score well on tests because their life depends on it. Doing poorly on the PSLE taken at the end of sixth grade virtually guarantees you will never attend university and will limit your income for the rest of your life. Parents in Singapore spend thousands every year on private tuition, the sole goal of which is to produce high test scores. Singapore also recognizes that they are not producing creative students. In fact they wish they were more like the US.