Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.

In education, parody is obsolete.

It's not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them. It's that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproducti ve. 'Doing to' strategies - as opposed to those that might be described as 'working with' - can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.

Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.