Welcome to an education blog dedicated to helping us connect to kids, and to all learners.

We all want kids to learn and to feel inspired. Ask them and they'll tell you: the surefire way to make elevated learning happen is to forge a meaningful human connection with them. Before we can address concepts such as math anxiety or other behavioral/learning/technological challenges we face, our foremost job is to connect to students as people. Then we all flourish.

These posts take a lot of time and effort to produce, thus they are not the most frequent in the history of blog-land. To receive new posts privately and securely to your email as soon as they're live, you're invited to join our mailing list at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!

What goes through my mind while fire threatens to burn down my home

Robert Ahdoot

Nov 27, 2018
3 min

What goes through my mind while fire threatens to burn down my home

This was the view from behind a friend's house nearby. The fireman is keeping an eye on the fire's potential approach. Nothing squashes the anxiety attached to the rigmarole of daily life quite like the prospect of your home going up in flames. I didn’t particularly like the vehicle of such a lesson, but now with our home intact, I’ll accept the important reminder of how to emotionally prioritize. The recent Woolsey fire forced thousands of residents from their homes, inclu

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Are teachers biased towards students? Yup.

Robert Ahdoot

Feb 16, 2017
5 min

Are teachers biased towards students? Yup.

(This piece was picked up on Smartbrief Education, as does collaboratively on a monthly basis.) Gulp, someone said it. As much as we take for granted that students are graded solely on their work alone, we know in our hearts that our personal biases towards each student can play a factor in how we assess them. If you’re an automaton who’s unaffected by your students’ behaviors and thus immune from human emotional trappings, please feel free to stop reading. But if you’re lik

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Robert Ahdoot

Nov 16, 2016
6 min

Lessons from Mister Rogers

(This piece was picked up on ASCD Smartbrief Education, as does collaboratively on a monthly basis.) (Special thanks to the Fred Rogers Center, for taking an interest in this article and sharing it with their readers, who also recognize Rogers' brilliance. Here is their retweet of Yay Math's article.) On May 1st 1969, a young and dapper Fred Rogers offered testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. The far less known Rogers made his case before the initially brus

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Robert Ahdoot

Dec 25, 2012
2 min

Gratitude poem

In our holiday season, I thought it important to write about what I'm grateful for. So a poem then. (Cue harmonica sound...) In a media environment that focuses on what's broken, I'm grateful to know of education systems that work. We hear of budget cuts and tuition hikes, Union squabbles and teacher strikes. Yet what of systems that everyone likes? Finland's culture is of teacher respect, For quality education is what they expect. And while India equates more learning to mor

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