Jason Wallestad

Exploring the worlds where parenting, teaching, advising, and coding coincide.



Jason Wallestad

Why music teachers matter

April 2, 2014

An elementary school orchestra makes a terrible sound, and any parent who tells you otherwise is a liar. But as my daughter’s orchestra conductor led his beginners through a simple song in their first ever concert last year, he smiled broadly, kept the beat with emphatic arms, and seemed to hear only beautiful sounds.

What parents don’t want to hear at parent-teacher conferences

March 30, 2014

When my wife and I sat down at our daughter’s 5th grade parent-teacher conference last week, we hoped to get a sense that the teacher understood our daughter and her strengths and weaknesses.  But we didn’t.  Instead, the teacher provided us with a litany of numbers and test results the school and the education-testing industry Read More

Tools vs. Skills: Rethinking WordPress and the focus of modern scholastic journalism

August 27, 2013

Our students use a lot of tools in their work as journalists; they use physical tools such as computers, phones, recording devices, card readers, and cameras, but they also use software tools such as InDesign, PhotoShop, and Microsoft Word. It seems that in the last five years, there’s been a veritable explosion of new tools Read More

Developing an authentic and effective grading system in a journalism class

April 8, 2013

Every year I struggle with how to grade my journalism students –– they all have different responsibilities and assignments, and there just isn’t an easy formula for grading all the things they do.  Some students write, some take pictures, some design pages, some copyedit, and some lead and coordinate –– none of it translates easily Read More

Toward more effective revision: teaching editors and writers self-sufficiency

February 23, 2013

With every student I’ve taught, the writing process varies––some students can write beautiful first drafts and some require dozens of drafts to get there.  Critiquing a story, like writing one, is an art, and the writing teacher’s and editor’s job is to sense the needs of each writer and help him or her build a Read More

Becoming an online-first publication

February 12, 2013

My journalism students have been publishing an online edition for five years now, and it’s only in the last two years that they’ve really figured out how to do it right.  When we first launched our website, it was a novelty, an afterthought, a place where we deposited our stories after they were printed, hoping Read More

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