The struggle is to stay present enough when you're taking your next step forward that you're really making your most honest choices.
Authentic interest is generated when students are given the opportunity to delve deeply into an interesting idea.
I am not simply teaching the reading; I am teaching the reader.
Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers.
Shouldn't schools be the place where students interact with interesting books? Shouldn't the faculty have an ongoing laser-like commitment to put good books in our students' hands? Shouldn't this be a front-burner issue at all times?
Want to extinguish an adolescent's curiosity? Cover as much material as possible.
I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.
My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
But one thing that we have done in the last four years is we have really put pressure on the leadership of this organization [Al Qaeda]. We have killed a significant number of leaders. We've captured others. Those that remain have to look over their shoulders, they have to be on the run. So that even if we don't manage to kill or capture them all within four years, what we do do is put the kind of pressure on them that makes them focus on their own skins, as opposed to carrying out attacks.
An excuse is a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.