Larry Ferlazzo is a veteran teacher of English and Social Studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He has written seven books on education - including a few on student motivation, and writes extensively on education issues, including authoring a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher, and maintaining a popular resource-sharing blog.

In the past few years, parents, teachers, and policy makers have furiously debated whether standardized tests should be used to promote or hold back children, fire teachers, and withhold funds from schools. The debate has focused for the most part on whether the tests are being used in unfair ways.

In the spring of 1991, I returned to teaching after more than five years as a Benedictine monk. The monastery had been founded in China in the 1920s, and when exiled after the Chinese Revolution, the community had relocated to the Mojave Desert in California.

Grades are just a math game. This is what I told students many years ago. "If you know how to work the numbers, you can get a good grade."

Now that we're back to school, what are some ways you can shake things up in the new year? Here are 10 ideas to try out in your classroom, no matter how big or small your learners may be. Have some ideas of your own?

Since elementary school, I knew that grades mattered - a lot. I was a keen student who spent most of my schooling chasing after the highest marks and beating myself up for anything less than an "A". Looking back, I was more concerned with playing the "grading game" than actually learning.

Do you remember the summer when you first fell in love? The songs that were playing on the radio, butterflies in the stomach, the excitement of a stolen kiss? The tendency of our brains to especially hold onto memories from the teenage years is called the "reminiscence bump."

What's the best way to take control of your own life and push yourself against boundaries? According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, it's all about your mindset. Successful people tend to focus on growth, solving problems and self-improvement, while unsuccessful people think of their abilities as fixed assets and avoid challenges.

Having essential questions drive curriculum and learning has become core to many educators' instructional practices. Grant Wiggins, in his work on Understanding By Design, describes an essential question as: A meaning of "essential" involves important questions that recur throughout one's life. Such questions are broad in scope and timeless by nature.