Hello, I’m Risa Gluskin. You probably know that since you’ve found this website.

After 25 years of teaching, I am taking a year off to rest, relax, and share my experience. I get a lot of requests through this blog to share my materials. It seems natural to me to expand on that.

I will use this blog to link to future videos, blog posts, links, maybe podcasts, etc. designed to help you teach world history at the high school level. Please go to the “For Teachers of World History” tab. Below you’ll find a running list of posts.

Watch this short intro.

Link to #1.

Link to #2.

Since today is the first day of the 2023-24 school year in Ontario, I will start out with my first post.

Art and/of Teaching

We’ve all heard the expression, “the art of teaching.” What about art and teaching? By that I don’t mean teaching art history. In a nutshell, this is the core of my approach to sharing what I have learned these past 25 years about teaching the fascinating and fun subject of world history.

I’ve long considered myself uncreative and unartistic (mandatory grade 7 art was my worst mark ever, lower than math). However, during the pandemic I started to learn how to paint. I’ve continued on and off over the last three plus years. I’m still rather basic and progressing slowly, but I enjoy it and have more recently devoted a lot of time to it, especially watching YouTube videos of other people teaching me.

This new painting hobby (and its accompanying skill development) has helped me to recognize that I am somewhat creative. Teaching and planning courses are creative acts.

Since I want my year off to be meaningful, I’ve decided to frame my “sharing” through an examination of the parallels between learning to paint and learning to teach. Today’s post is just the introduction but I hope it will guide me in the weeks and months to come. Please stay tuned here since I don’t use social media.

Parallels

• need to practice (Sept. 12, 2023)
• need to step back and look at your work from a distance (Sept. 19, 2023)
• avoid obsessing over every detail and go with ‘good enough’, not perfection
• pick the right tool for the job
• work within the constraints of time, budget (aka reality)
• know your limits
• be self-critical to a point
• educate yourself
• take risks, challenges and stretch yourself
• love what you do

Thank you for starting this journey with me. I will address, ponder, and explore the above 10 parallels throughout the year.