Education in Context

If something feels boring or difficult, the issue is probably that you're missing the context. Let's remedy that.

  • George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing (How They Apply to Your Writing and Your Life)

    Clear back in April of 1946 (so, seventy-eight years ago at the time of this writing, after the publication of Animal Farm, but before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-four), George Orwell wrote an essay called “Politics and the English Language” that came out in Horizon.3, The whole essay is important and worth reading, so I…

  • Secret Math Tricks (How to Multiply by 1 and Add 0)

    I know, I know. This sounds utterly ridiculous. Secret math tricks? Multiplying by 1? Adding 0? Why on Earth would we do that? But it’s legit. Here we go. The Reason These Secret Math Tricks Are Useful We’re not allowed to just change math problems to make them easier for ourselves, because then we would…

  • How To Math With Fractions

    If I’ve learned anything during my time working as a math tutor (with students from 5th grade all the way through college), it’s this: The #1 Big Bad Math Enemy that makes it hard to do math is fractions. Seriously. When I was working in the Math Center at the University of Utah, college students…

  • The Passive Voice (vs The Active Voice)

    If you’ve been paying attention to grammar lessons and/or the little red comments that teachers write on your papers (please pay attention to these things and don’t let your teachers’ hard work go to waste!), then you’ve probably heard of the passive voice. And that it’s bad and we shouldn’t use it. But what exactly…

Here, we’re working to provide context both for specific concepts and ideas and for the history of the American education system as a whole.

This is a young website, so if you’ve somehow found it already…congratulations on your internet sleuthing skills, and also please be patient while I write more things for it!

I hope to add articles about details of all of the basic tenets of American secondary education (Math, English/Language Arts, History/Social Studies, Science, etc.) as well as articles about why our education system is how it is, what could change, and what changes are underway. This will probably take me a while, so if what you’re seeing is just a few articles… please check back soon! 🙂