As a teacher, I used to look forward to summer vacation. As a principal, summer is precious work time. While I have a few weeks of vacation that I take here and there, I work for most of the summer. There’s a lot to do: supervising summer school, planning for the following year, hiring teachers.
There’s also a magic to summer school. While long-term planning for the year is intense, things also slow down. I have a tiny staff of 5 teachers and 3 support staff, and I get to work closely with them in a way that would be impossible during the school year with a much larger staff of 40 people.
The best part about summer school: some of the boys who struggled the most during the school year have transformed into fantastic students. Continue reading
A friend was recently telling me about his experience when he was a child in the 5th grade. “I used to get in trouble before the 5th grade. But my 5th grade teacher, she liked me. It was like, she never expected me to do anything bad. So I didn’t.”
My school is a school for newcomer immigrant English Language Learners. With recent events at the Mexican border, I have been thinking about the parents of my students and their journeys in coming to the United States with their children. This past week, I had the opportunity to speak with the father of Marcos. * Marcos is a student from Peru who came to the U.S. when he was in the 9th grade.
My school is in the process of interviewing prospective teachers for the next school year. Last week I wrote about 
I founded the High School of Language and Innovation in 2011 with eight teachers teaching 90 students. We have now grown to 28 teachers and 350 students and have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the past seven years. In our interviews with teachers, we ask questions about topics like teamwork, teaching, taking responsibility for student results. But there is one question that tells us volumes about the candidate.
