Mr. Schindler’s Neighborhood

Mr. Schindler’s Neighborhood is a teacher's podcast built on the ordinary rhythm of a school week. Episodes have plain titles such as '21-22 School Year Episode 12', and the school-year episodes all open the same way: Mr. Schindler reviews what his math class did, often day by day, then looks ahead to what comes next. The math is concrete. One week covers ratios, and the next moves to rates, explained with miles per hour, miles per gallon and beats per minute. Other recaps cover composite figures, the four quadrants of the coordinate plane, similar triangles identified by matching angles, and inequalities and factoring fitted in before the MCAs. Test prep shows up as well, including a round of Jeopardy before a unit test on area, perimeter, triangles and trapezoids. Student interviews come up often, and they stay loose. One conversation moves from meatballs and gravy with biscuits too hard to bite through, to how quickly the year has gone, to a story about roping winnings. Then the sports begin. Students trade picks with their teacher on college football, from a Pac-12 championship game to Army-Navy. They also pick FCS playoff games tied to a bracket the class filled out. He admits his own pick record is below .500, and he tells one student who does not follow football that knowing less might be an advantage. The Vikings get a vent of their own. It previews games, grumbles that the team never sweeps the Bears, and weighs a high draft pick if the season goes badly. In one episode it closes with students forecasting the last four games. Another episode replaces the interview with an NFL mock draft, with students each taking teams to see how accurately they can call the first round. Two smaller segments fill the gaps: the best thing he saw that week, such as good weather getting students outside for recess, and a message about focusing on little things. 'Standards Based Grading' is different from all of this. Recorded for a graduate class, it came after about three years without a podcast, by his own account. It argues for measuring mastery of standards rather than averaging scores into a percentage. He bases the case on fairness, equity, motivation and a shared language across grade levels. Then he turns to the hard part: parents and community members who resist because letter grades worked fine for them. He also asks how the approach would carry over to high school transcripts, citing a 2024 article by Morris. Across the episodes the talk is conversational and good-humored, with plenty of back-and-forth with students. '21-22 School Year Episode 13' announces the whole lineup in its opening, and '21-22 School Year Episode 23' is the one with the mock draft.