Amanda Maher

If the teacher is the only one doing the explaining, they're the only one doing the learning.

IMO, we make teaching harder than it should be exactly because we don't rely on student understanding, background knowledge, and our collective capacity for collaborative sensemaking.

here’s a curse word free version of “look it up” as requested by countless teachers and librarians 🥰😘

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at Stanford University have developed a dual-antibody treatment that remains effective against ALL SARS-CoV-2 variants by targeting a less-mutable part of the virus. This breakthrough could lead to longer-lasting therapies that OUTPACE viral evolution. 🧪🧵⬇️

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

One of the best things you can do right now is read books. Buy them. Borrow them from the library. Gift them.

Read history. Read fiction. Read science writing. Read anything that shows you the world is bigger than what fascists say it is.

Read to remember why your resistance matters. 📚💙

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King

Thinking a lot about Jimmy Carter, born a white, rural man in 1924 in a strictly apartheid Georgia and how he became a champion for racial justice and human rights, demonstrating once again that racism, xenophobia, crass and selfish individualism, are always a choice.

I don’t want my class to prepare students for ‘the real world.’

I want my class to help students dream of a better world.

Nikki Giovanni describes how she doesn't think death is the end of us.

From an interview I did with Nikki Giovanni back in 2017:

Poet Ada Limon standing at a blue podium with a rainbow-colored heart on it.

"Inside a poem, anything is possible. Maybe we can make that true of life as well."

Ada Limon's #NCTE24 keynote was everything my heart needed.

One of the central jobs of everyone who works in education but is not a classroom teacher should be ensuring classroom teachers have enough (time, energy, knowledge, training, resources).

If you nurture and value teachers, you nurture and value the children in front of them.

Book cover THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES shows a surly 7th grade boy with a backpack and FDNY baseball hat standing on top of a mountain, looking into the distance. A drooly Bernese Mountain Dog looks up at him adoringly.

Time for a book giveaway!

If you'd like me to mail you an advance copy of my Apr. '25 MG novel in verse THE TROUBLE WITH HEROES, follow & share this post. Bonus entry if you also reply w/ a pic from a recent hike!

I'll draw winners on 12/1.

About the book:
bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
#edusky

Hi Bluesky friends🥰