Blogs on Teacher Development

I was talking to a group of high schoolers the other day, and we were chatting about school issues. We spoke about their favorite subjects (none said recess, thank goodness), the typical challenges high schoolers face, socializing, and, of course, technology's place in their lives.

William of Ockham was a fourteenth-century logician and Franciscan friar in England. He came up with the lex parsimoniae, or the law of succinctness, which says entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Occam's razor, as it came to be known, states that when given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated. Or, as architect Mies van der Rohe famously said, "Less is more."

As a longtime educator and a classroom English teacher for twenty-seven years, I've seen all kinds of student "bad behavior."

Edutopia.org's blogs launched in mid-March 2006, and their popularity has been spiraling upward, thanks to our talented bloggers and to you, our readers, who visit us daily, bookmark the blog, post your comments, and email suggestions for new postings. Here's my roundup of the picks of 2006.