Sarah Mulhern Gross

@thereadingzone.bsky.social

1928 Followers 1912 Following

NBCT, English @ High Tech, past chair @alanorg Walden, AIP MAT Bio @ WCS, NYTimes Learning Network, #nerdcampNJ organizer

New Jersey Project - News 1d • & 3RD GR Teacher in Scotch Plains Fanwood read "The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane." which contains heart wrenching deaths and suicidal ideation. She didn't notifiy parents that she was covering such a heavy topic even though she was given a warning about the book. Thoughts?
Robert Wong, Google's director of product management for learning and education, said the tools are invaluable for students whose parents cannot help them with math homework. He suggested that cheating had less to do with access to A.l. than with "other factors, like, are students engaged in the class?"
Screenshot of cover of middle school guide
Trump Administration Cuts Research Funding, Claiming It Creates ‘Climate Anxiety’ The cuts to a Princeton University program come as the Trump administration has been reviewing an array of research grants related to global warming.
This feast of the imagination will teach children to have a realistic sense of what truly is possible in this life and wherein lie life's boundaries. They will see goodness and beauty, evil and ugliness for what they are. They will see that forsaking the ordinary duties of marriage and parenthood to "find oneself" and live as an "expressive individual" is chasing a mirage . They will learn this from the misery that romantic escapism brought Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Farmer Boy" shows children that in this life, reward comes after long, hard work. Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden" illustrates what resilience looks like. C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" portrays the good and evil that lurk within each one of us. Greek myths teach children proportion. Robert Louis Stevenson introduces children to beauty in lyrical form. Classical music gives them the best that can be offered to the ear.
Without religious beliefs, traditions or standards to connect them with permanent things, young people feel tremendous anxiety about who they are and how they should find meaning. They have read no good literature or history that would furnish their imaginations with examples of heroism, or even ordinary men and women overcoming the ordinary challenges of life. They have seen no movies that illustrate real beauty, heard no music that draws them upward, and seen no art that stirs in them a sense of the transcendent. For them, modernity is-to borrow a term from T.S. Eliot— a wasteland.
Technology addiction and parental coddling aren't the causes of mental-health problems in young people, but rather symptoms. The real problem is the romantic corruption of imagination. Imagination is far more powerful than logic or reason. It colors our entire view of life and life's possibilities. A well-formed imagination- one properly adjusted to reality-can adapt to life's vicissitudes and see life steady and see it whole.
Sample bookplates with student name, graduating class, and a short message to future students who pick up this book.
Bookshelf with a variety of student- chosen books.
Bookshelf with a variety of student- chosen books.
an ascension. While we still have the institutions of school and class time as well as the books that line our walls, we need to challenge students with language and characters that may not come to them immediately but might with healthy discipline.
It's easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok's corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.
Man and woman in Eagles gear at the parade
Screenshot of the audiobook cover of Libba Bray’s’s new book Under the Same Stars
A black playdoh cauldron with a pink pompom. Three small candles on a tiled floor.
Headless Female playdoh creation that is wearing a red dress with a yellow belt and a googly eye below the waist.
A playdoh creation with 4 legs, feathers as wings, and a tail made of pompons.