December 12th is a Mexican National Holiday, and an important day for many Mexican-Americans — The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe. You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning & Teaching About The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe.
‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Click here to read this mailing online.

Your email updates, powered by FeedBlitz

 
Here is a sample subscription for you. Click here to start your FREE subscription


  1. Dec. 12th Is The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources
  2. Video: The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Spanish
  3. Video: It Appears That Toy Story 5’s Plot Could Be A Classroom Allegory
  4. No, Virginia, It Appears That There May Not Be Any Miracles In Education, Including In Mississippi
  5. Research Studies Of The Week
  6. More Recent Articles

Dec. 12th Is The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources

 

December 12th is a Mexican National Holiday, and an important day for many Mexican-Americans — The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe.

You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning & Teaching About The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe.

     

Video: The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Spanish

 

When I teach World History to ELLs, we study the Epic of Gilgamesh, and students summarize the different portions of the story and create illustrated books.

You can see resources I use for that activity here.

TED-Ed has created a video about the epic in Spanish, which will come in quite handy for that lesson:

 

     

Video: It Appears That Toy Story 5’s Plot Could Be A Classroom Allegory

angrybirds7 /Pixabay

 

The first trailer for Toy Story 5 definitely spoke to the tech challenges facing education, and this newest one brings the point home even more clearly:

 

     

No, Virginia, It Appears That There May Not Be Any Miracles In Education, Including In Mississippi

waldryano / Pixabay

 

The so-called “Mississippi Miracle,” indicated that the reading skills of elementary students in that state made extraordinary reading gains, has received a lot of attention.

Now, however, an ambitious reexamination of the data suggests that the gains may have been a statistical illusion – that the increased fourth-grade reading scores were inflated by a new law requiring that “poor performing” third-graders be retained.

You can read all about it at How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias? (be sure to also review the many comments left on that post – another researcher in one of them suggested that that state’s vastly increased identification of learning disabled students who didn’t have to take the test was another cause of the increased scores).

As that post also points out, there have been many “miracles” touted in education (see The Best Posts About Attrition Rates At So-Called “Miracle” Schools).

Perhaps we should stop hoping for miracles and be satisfied with small, incremental progress, which is what most teachers know?

What works in education, when it works, and under what circumstances is a complicated issue.  Perhaps we should all acknowledge that complicated issues don’t easily lend themselves to simple answers, as Michael Pershan pointed out in I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You.

 

     

Research Studies Of The Week

Mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature.

You can see all my “Best” lists related to education research here.

Here are some new useful studies (and related resources):

What happens to reading comprehension when students focus on the main idea is from The Hechinger Report. I’m adding it to The Best Posts On Reading Strategies & Comprehension – Help Me Find More!

7 Research-Backed Tech Tips You Can Use Today is from Edutopia.

Universal school masking reduced weekly COVID-19 deaths by 0.57 per 100k people. 50 percent of districts removed mask requirements by spring 2022 contributing to 9 percent of COVID deaths that year, from Guzman, Imberman, Filosa, Kilbride, and Malkus https://www.nber.org/papers/w33849

[image or embed]

— NBER (@nber.org) May 31, 2025 at 8:00 AM

Great coverage of the AEI convening led by @natmalkus.bsky.social focused on chronic absenteeism and what’s driving it (featuring @jjacobkirksey.bsky.social @ehutt.bsky.social and others) www.the74million.org/article/chro…

[image or embed]

— Morgan Polikoff (@mpolikoff.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 7:40 AM

     

More Recent Articles