How to not be stressed with high school scheduling

So we start scheduling next week and im stressed I won't get the classes I want. I understand im a freshman and will be the last grade to schedule but its the fact there's no preference based on grades or even really first come, its by our social studies class so if someone is the last class they just get what ever. The classes I want are AP Chem, AP Calc, Independent art, DC College Alg/trig, AP Lit, AP World Civilization. In that order since my school only offers one class period for an AP class. Its also the fact that they let Anyone take an AP class.

Submitted April 21, 2026 at 12:43PM by Bootsy-spins-13 https://ift.tt/bT9eXtQ

Requesting course material for friend in Malawi

Hello! This is a strange request, so I'll give a little bit of backstory. Feel free to skip if not interested.

My parents before they had me had gone to Malawi as part of my mom's bachelor degree in medicine, during which she'd met a whole bunch of people but one of them was a bright young kid. This kid is now in his 30s, and he's found a way to contact us again which was a very emotional time for my mom especially. Nowadays he's dabbling in agriculture consultancy. They want to go visit him again in Malawi later this year, and he'd like a laptop and we decided to patch one up and give him one of our own.

Internet is very very limited where he lives, from what I can tell he can only really access low-data resources from his phone. He comes from a place where they must farm for their own survival and where clean water isn't a guarantee. We'd like to help him by putting a bunch of useful course material on the laptop before we give it to him. He's interested in the following topics:

- Business
- Entrepeneurship
- Agriculture/land revitalization
- Microsoft Excel/Word
- Professional writing

If anyone happens to have online material on any of these subjects, or other subjects that could be useful to their situation like water purification with limited resources, we'd be very grateful to receive some so we can send it to him! Links to where such documents can be found would also be helpful, though I don't know what's useful and what isn't.

Not to get sappy, but you can kinda see it as a form of charity except instead of money you're giving information :P

Thanks!

Submitted April 21, 2026 at 08:04AM by Athlaeos https://ift.tt/QOsReqD

If someone doesn’t get IITs/NITs and ends up doing M.Tech from a private college like Galgotias

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Submitted April 21, 2026 at 02:33AM by One_Attempt_670 https://ift.tt/woO1D6Y

every piece of phonics reading advice parents get at home, and why most of it doesn't work

I teach and I have a 5yo. That combination has made it genuinely hard to be around at school pickup when this subject comes up. I found some things that parents are actually being told versus what the research on phonics reading instruction actually supports.

"Just read to them every day" - valuable for vocabulary, comprehension, and loving books. Not a substitute for explicit decoding instruction. Reading to a child and teaching a child to read are two different activities and treating them as interchangeable is how kids get to second grade unable to sound out words they've never seen before.

"Point at words while you read" - marginally better than nothing. Does not constitute systematic phonics instruction. A child learning to associate the shape of a word with its sound is pattern recognition, not decoding. These collapse quickly once they see words they haven't memorized.

"Use flashcards for sight words" - this one specifically frustrates me because it explicitly teaches memorization over decoding. Some high frequency words need to be known on sight eventually but leading with memorization before phonics foundation is backwards and a lot of research says so.

"Apps that kids enjoy independently" - engagement is not a literacy outcome. A child can complete two hundred app lessons enthusiastically and have a patchy phoneme foundation because the app is optimized for retention metrics rather than systematic instruction sequence. Apps like reading .com follow a direct instruction model, though it requires a parent present for every session which isn't for everyone as well as All About Reading being the main one people recommend for home use. The above list is mostly good intentions with weak instructional foundations and parents deserve to know the difference."

"Make it fun, don't make it a lesson" - I understand the impulse and I'm not arguing for joyless drilling. But systematic phonics requires explicit instruction in a logical sequence and that is by definition a lesson. The goal is to make the lesson feel enjoyable, not to replace the lesson with play and hope it transfers.

The above list is mostly good intentions with weak instructional foundations and parents deserve to know the difference.

Submitted April 21, 2026 at 12:17AM by Novel_Savings_4184 https://ift.tt/u1OeY4P

ALEKS > iReady ??

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I am very firmly anti-Ai in the classroom across the board. Our administration wants us to move towards using ALEKS from McGraw-Hill (I think) in place of i-Ready for the rest of the year and potentially start with it next year. I know that they upload their own textbooks and workbooks to create the question database, but I cannot find any other information about how they power The AI component. I am putting it off as long as I can before they tell me I need to administer the diagnostic to my students in the classroom. I would love any further information anybody can share or if anybody has used it in their classroom, what their students thought about it. Thanks!

(Posted on r/Teachers as well)

Submitted April 20, 2026 at 02:15PM by bboomerang https://ift.tt/WRhuzMw

To the person who thinks they're just not academically smart enough: I was that person.

I want to write this carefully because I know it can come across as empty motivation-posting.

At 16 I had genuinely convinced myself that academic ability was a fixed trait distributed unevenly at birth, and that I'd received less than my share.

Not in a dramatic way. Just a background assumption that shaped how I approached studying. Why spend hours on something if the capacity isn't there?

What changed my mind wasn't a motivational speech. It was learning something specific: the concept of neuroplasticity.

The brain is not static. It physically changes as you learn — new connections form, existing pathways strengthen, and this continues throughout life. Difficulty during learning is the mechanism of this change, not evidence of incapacity.

The students who seemed to absorb things effortlessly were, in almost every case I later found out about, either using better methods, had encountered the material before, or had simply put in hours I hadn't seen.

This isn't about pretending there are no differences in initial ability. There are. But the ceiling most students hit isn't biological — it's methodological and motivational.

I'm not going to tell you everyone can achieve anything with enough effort. That's not honest.

But I will say: most people are nowhere near their actual ceiling. They're limited by approach, not capacity.

If you needed to hear this today — consider it said.

TL;DR: Spent years believing I had a fixed academic ceiling. Learning about neuroplasticity (the brain physically changes as you learn) changed my approach. Most students are limited by method and consistency, not capacity.

Submitted April 20, 2026 at 07:48AM by yeahia121 https://ift.tt/wLKOqJv

History teachers first grade

Hi everyone,

If you are a history teacher for the first grade of secondary education (ages approx. 12–14), this post is specifically for you. But anyone is welcome!!

Which chapter or historical period do students find the most difficult to understand or tend to perform worst on?

If possible, could you also briefly explain why you think that is the case (lack of interest, abstract concepts, difficulty with chronology, teaching materials, etc.)?

Of course, if you are not a teacher but still have relevant insights or experience, feel free to respond as well.

Thank you very much in advance!

Submitted April 20, 2026 at 06:09AM by MongoosePrimary406 https://ift.tt/sMXu9A7