How To Survive The Classroom

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edTPA Survival Guide

June 29, 2026

Teacher besties, we made it. This is the season finale of How to Survive the Classroom, and we're going out with a BIG one. Gerry has NEWS, he submitted his edTPA. Like, two hours before the Pacific Time deadline news. (He fully Patoka'd it.) He walks me through his 4 Ps of marketing lesson plan, we trauma-bond over watching yourself teach on video, and he reveals that his comedy tell when a joke bombs is just saying "Hell yeah" into the mic, which will now live rent-free in my head for the r...

New Teacher Survival Guide

June 22, 2026

It is officially summer, teacher besties, and I have made a HUGE mistake. I decided I wasn't going to pay for summer camp this year, which means I'm home with my own children, who can apparently sense when I'm overstimulated and somehow get closer AND louder. This week's How to Survive the Classroom is a wide-ranging chat that takes us from Gerry's truly unhinged childhood Holocaust summer camp, to the ethics of ghost tours, to the dark history of New Orleans, to the new-teacher essentials yo...

Winston Hodges on Working With Autistic Students & Going Viral on Funny AF

June 15, 2026

Gerry and I are joined by Funny AF top six finalist and stand-up comedian Winston Hodges, who, before he was making Kevin Hart, Chelsea Handler, and Kumail Nanjiani laugh on Netflix, spent four years teaching at a school for kids on the autism spectrum in Virginia. Winston shares some of the wildest classroom stories I've heard on this pod, whether it's getting hit with a globe mid-Civil War lecture, becoming the school's unofficial crisis negotiator, or the one-month average staff retention...