Teach half, not half-ass
Underdo other teachers
Learning is overrated
Enough with “tests”
Start a career, not an education
Let your students outgrow youEspecially in the early grades, a teacher has to be a generalist. Students who take an interest in any given subject will undoubtably know more about it then their teachers do. This is absolutely worth encouraging.
It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.
I started out with the concept as a joke/parody, but the more I went through the chapter titles, the more apt some of 37signals' ideas related to the education concept. Spooky!
Their ideas are so universal that they work everywhere. A few months ago, some of my Twitter friends and I went through Getting Real as if it were a book about curing constipation. Most of the chapter titles (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php) work as-is:
Less Mass
It Shouldn't Be A Chore
Hold the Mayo
Rinse and Repeat
Alone Time
Meetings Are Toxic
Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
A Softer Bullet
Track Your Logs
Beware the Bloat Monster
Go With the Flow
But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them, because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know something.
It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for precisely this reason.
When I was at high school (in the UK), teachers were keen to only cover things that were known to be in the eventual tests. In math, we skipped set theory entirely because it was known to not be in the final exams.