Welcome to the Teaching With Class Blog!

I have been teaching in bilingual, international education for 15 years, and I have some stories to tell you.

Some of them are funny. Really funny.

Some of them will break your heart.

And I hope some of them will give you ideas, and that you share those ideas with me in the comments.

What you’ll find here:

            These are the stories about my classrooms. I love my job, but teaching culture can be toxic. I am tired of blogs and articles and groups that try to make me believe that teaching is always beautiful, always meaningful, and always life changing. 

            It doesn’t feel that way when you realize that you can spend a day negotiating with a nine year old about the answers to the times tables.

            When you try to tell a friend with an office job about your day and they don’t quite believe how absurd your job can get, come here for some real talk.

            You’ll also find ideas for socially just teaching, rigorous content integration, and raising the expectations for our students.

            Our classrooms need to be places for hard conversations and diversity. We need to teach literature, history, and current events without the lens of privilege and comfort, because we need to be preparing our students to live in and change our world.

            That means treating them like the capable, intelligent people they are – even our young ones. It means that we need materials and ideas for bringing conversations about race, and hard history, and inequality into the classroom. It means we need to find ways to infuse all of our content with socially just materials. It means we need to raise our expectations – for critical thinking, for empathy, and for academic rigour. You’ll find stories, ideas, and materials for all of that here, and then, you can leave behind some of your own.

            We can do it. We’ll raise them right.