Our world is shrinking. How do we prepare kids to thrive in a global society?

Wendy Turner 2017 Delaware Teacher of the Year/Facebook

We live in an ever-shrinking world. Today, people can travel to practically any place on the planet—distances that used to take weeks or even months to traverse—in less than a day. People on opposite sides of the globe can talk face-to-face through handheld devices—a reality that was a futuristic dream even in my own lifetime. Thanks to constant advances in transportation and communication, we're living in an increasingly global society—one that our children will need to understand as they inherit it.

After 9/11, author and mother Homa Sabet Tavangar felt compelled to explore the impact of our rapidly changing world on her children. Tavangar had worked for 15 years helping companies become competitive in the global market, but she knew humanity needed more than than global business savvy. It needed compassionate, culturally competent people who strive to understand others and see themselves as citizens of the world.

Keep Reading
kids education children teaching peace globalization
Culture

A dad's viral kindergarten field trip post highlights how freaking amazing teachers are

Clint Edwards/Facebook

Anyone who has spent a day in a classroom knows that teachers—especially teachers of young kids—are superhuman superheroes. And any parent who has spent a day outside of a classroom trying to wrangle a group of young kids through a field trip would describe teachers in even stronger language than that.

That's what dad blogger Clint Edwards of No Idea What I'm Doing: A Daddy Blog discovered on a recent trip to a pumpkin patch with his daughter's kindergarten class. The father of three and author of a new book, "Silence is a Scary Sound: And Other Stories on Living Through the Terrible Twos and Threes," penned a tribute to teachers everywhere that has gone viral for the hilariously real truth it describes.

Keep Reading
teachers teaching parenting education family2019
popular

Teacher's viral 'baggage activity' brought her students to tears

What a beautiful idea.

Karen Wunderlich Loewe/Facebook

Update from the author: I wrote a follow-up to this article sharing a trauma-informed perspective of the activity. You can read it here.

Karen Loewe has been teaching for 22 years. Clearly, all of that experience has given her a solid bead on what her students really need.

The middle school English teacher from Oklahoma shared an activity she did with her students for the first day of school on Facebook and it's gone insanely viral. In just three days, her post has already been shared more than 335,000 times.

What has caught people's attention is something we all have in common—emotional baggage. We live in an era of rising mental health awareness, but also increased social pressures to appear as if you have all of your sh*t together. For kids in the turbulent middle school years, whose their bodies, minds, and spirits are growing at breakneck pace, having a place to share their emotional turmoil can be incredibly helpful. But many kids don't have a safe, supportive place to do that.

Keep Reading
mental health students teens school education teachers teaching
popular

Standardized tests don't tell the whole story. This author's viral tweet proves it.

What happens when you have a childhood dream to be a writer, but your test scores tell you it's not in the cards?

For Alexandra Penfold, she became a writer anyway — and a successful one at that. Penfold is a literary agent and the author of children's books like "All Are Welcome" and "We Are Brothers, We Are Friends."

In a viral tweet, Penfold shared an image of a self-evaluation she wrote in fourth grade. In scrawling cursive penmanship, it reads: "Writing. I love to write and I hope to become an athor [sic] someday."

Keep Reading
testing school teachers education students careers teaching learning writing standardized tests authors grade school alexandra penfold statewide testing nationwide testing
Most Shared