teacher

All about teachers and the world of teaching; teachers sharing their best and worst interactions with students, best teaching practices, the path to becoming a teacher, and more.

Teacher or Facilitator?
The face of education has changed over the course of time. In the past, teachers sat at their desks in the front of the classroom with a blackboard behind them. The student desks were in several neat rows facing the teacher. In certain photos, the students are all facing forward.
By Allison Mitchell Endicott14 days ago in Education
Comparing a Big City and a Small Town, a Writing Prompt
Prompt #2 Have you ever traveled through a small town and a large city? What are the similarities and differences between the town and city you visited? Write a description about both places. Describe what you like and dislike about both of these settings.
By Dean Traylor15 days ago in Education
The Teacher Who Saw Me: A Story of Belief and Transformation
Author's note: I originally wrote this story several years ago for a writing competition, as a tribute to a teacher whose belief in me changed my life. Revisiting it in 2026, I wanted to return to that memory with a little more understanding of what it meant to me.
By Sergios Saropoulos16 days ago in Education
My Daughter’s Name Wasn’t on the Teacher’s List
The Chinese teacher sent the dictation list while I was in the kitchen cutting potatoes. My phone buzzed on the coffee table, then buzzed again. I wiped my hands and went to look. The class group already had a dozen “received” replies. The teacher had listed the students who got every word right, followed by: “For those who did not get everything right, I have sent the incorrect characters to each parent privately. Please supervise your child and have them write the characters again.”
By Jin17 days ago in Education
Beyond External Etiquette: The Spiritual Science of Listening and Capturing the Murshid’s Gaze
The Lost Art of Human Reception If you walk into the lecture halls of Oxford or Cambridge, you will discover that communication is broken down into two distinct, rigorously trained sciences: the art of speaking and the art of listening. In modern society, however, human beings have become obsessed with the former while completely abandoning the latter.
By Majid Saeed17 days ago in Education
The Math AI Can’t Do for Us
Mathematical research aims to discover new mathematical knowledge. That sounds tautological, but it is often reduced to a narrower claim: the aim is to produce the first proof of an unsolved problem. These are not the same thing. A theorem proved true is an important kind of knowledge. Mathematical knowledge also includes methods, concepts, proof paths, error estimates, structural insight, the ecology of problems, and the judgment of what is worth pursuing. Proofs are the hard currency of mathematics. They are not the whole of its wealth.
By Jin18 days ago in Education
OpenAI Solved Hundreds of Math Problems. Then It Left Mathematicians to Clean Up the Mess.
OpenAI released 722 AI-generated mathematics manuscripts in October 2026. Several were retracted almost immediately after symbolic errors appeared, and more were revised or withdrawn in the following weeks. From a simple “knowledge increment” view, this looks like a windfall. Hundreds of open problems were touched. Even when a result is wrong, knowing that a path is blocked has value. The mathematical community did not react with gratitude. Terence Tao called the output “toxic waste.” Yu Deng asked a sharper question: users’ ideas had trained the model, the model then used those ideas to solve open problems, and “what do we, as users, get?” The dispute is about how OpenAI handed its output to the mathematical community, and whether that method weakens the conditions that make knowledge increment possible.
By Jin18 days ago in Education
OpenAI Proved Half of Yang-Mills. The Missing Half Is the One Pauli Would Not Drop.
In the spring of 2019, Yang Chen-Ning, then ninety-six, sat in Tsinghua and told visitors a story from 1954. He and Robert Mills had calculated a result that was “very, very beautiful,” but it contained a wound they could not close. According to their theory, there should exist a particle with charge but no mass. Nature contained no such thing. They agonized over it and decided to publish anyway. Yang gave two reasons. First, the structure was too beautiful to abandon. Second, field theory itself had not yet received a precise mathematical description. It was plagued by divergences, and yet “this did not prevent it from achieving miraculous success in the renormalization program.” Then he added: “Pauli chose not to publish.”
By Jin18 days ago in Education
The Modern Witch Hunt: How TPUSA UO Fabricates Rhetoric for Rage-Bait
On a university campus, student life should center on critical thinking, academic growth, and civil discourse. Yet, political organizations like Turning Point USA at the University of Oregon (TPUSA UO) continue to rely on a different tactic: sensationalized rage-bait, fabricated characterizations, and targeted public smear campaigns .
By Sai Marie Johnson18 days ago in Education
Schools Need to Stop Fighting AI and Start Teaching Students How to Use It
I spent a significant portion of my childhood struggling with reading and writing. Even today, although to a lesser degree, those challenges haven’t entirely disappeared.
By zane faour19 days ago in Education
The Mirror of the Pure vs. The Diplomacy of Strangers: The Lost Art of Friendship We Forgot to Teach Our Children
I. The Silent Crime of Politeness: The Masks We Fasten on Young Faces We commit a silent, benevolent crime against our children when we teach them that the crowning proof of friendship is never to disagree, and that social virtue consists of unbroken, desperate flattery. We send them into schoolyards, playgrounds, and digital corridors carrying premature masks, teaching them to monitor every cadence of their breath, to weigh every syllable in their throats, and to smooth down every sharp edge of their authentic feelings lest they fracture a fragile alliance.
By Noor Kids Academy20 days ago in Education
Tao Called AI Math “Toxic Waste.” The Fight Is Over Who Cleans Up.
n October 2026, OpenAI’s mathematics manuscript repository showed 722 rows. The next day, three rows turned gray. Retracted. Then came 14 revisions, 13 citation updates, and a total of 719. Around then, Terence Tao said “toxic waste” on the SAIR podcast. Headlines cut the phrase out and used it as proof that Tao had rejected AI mathematics outright. Put the sentence back into the audio. The clauses around it are still there. He was describing proofs driven by benchmarks, dumped in bulk, and left for no one in particular to digest. His target was the mode of production and the allocation of responsibility.
By Jin21 days ago in Education