New story at Medium:
The bookshelves in my parents’ home are laden with colorful volumes of classroom teaching tips my mother accumulated over her decades teaching high school English between the 1970s and 1990s. Some were handed down as graduation gifts from teaching college professors; others were picked up at annual teachers’ conferences in the state capital, 150 miles away. At the time, they represented one of the only ways teachers, working alone in disconnected classrooms, could find new methods to engage their students: bought out of pocket, photocopied and shared with other teachers, stored for years in bulging classroom filing cabinets.
If my mom were teaching today, things would look a lot different.