If high-quality content can be effectively delivered via technology, teachers can devote more time to creating innovative experiences, leading Socratic dialogs, or coaching students one-on-one in more targeted and focused interventions.
Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.
When I was in junior high, I went to a really hippy dippy Quaker school where we called our teachers by their first names and stuff.
Teachers are by nature idealists, and they believe anything can be learned.
I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.
My father and my mother were both teachers. They inculcated to us the importance of studies.
Sure, the job of high school teachers is not to tear down students' self-esteem. But it's certainly not to inflate students' sense of self-worth with a bunch of unearned compliments and half-truths.
Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
Teachers can use technology-based assessments to inform their instruction. These assessments can quickly produce data and surface patterns that help teachers identify where students are faltering and intervene with targeted coaching immediately, before the student falls too far behind.
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
A really large number of teachers contact us offline testifying how valuable iPads are for their students.
I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging.
The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.
All of these 'protections' were put into place to provide public school teachers with the kind of job security and cushy work rules that United Auto Workers have enjoyed.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Events sometimes are the biggest teachers, as opposed to words, lectures, and that kind of thing.
Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.
We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.
David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.
At the federal level, we must help, not hinder, local school boards, parents, teachers and administrators as they make decisions about educating our children.
