I always knew that teaching would creep back into my life more fully once I graduated school, but I can’t say I anticipated teaching ESL, especially high school ESL. Now that the essays are graded and the grades are turned in, I have to admit that I’m sad my Monday afternoons won’t be filled with …
As school has started back, I’ve had the great opportunity to be in the classroom again as a substitute teacher. It is certainly a different kind of teaching experience because you are walking in cold not knowing students names, the material, or the social dynamics going on in the classroom. It’s a phenomenon that students …
I’ve started volunteering in an afterschool program. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to at first because I knew it would be even harder than teaching kids in high poverty. You only get one chance a week. Only a couple of hours. I knew I’d get attached immediately to their faces and their spirits. I …
If any of my students have kept those black composition books that we used as writer’s notebooks. I wonder if they run across them in their rooms or closets or under their beds and remember our class community. I wonder if they remember that for that little bit of time they were writers and dreamers. …
I learned early on when I began to blog with students that if you allow too much time to pass between the experience (whether that’s reading, a guest speaker, a field trip) and writing about the experience, then students’ writing becomes stagnant and lifeless. To truly capture their voices, students need time during the experience …
Maybe working with students isn’t about what we want: Yet many teachers are not comfortable with their student’s media: they don’t listen to the same genre of music; they don’t play video games; they don’t watch the same TV shows or movies which appeal to their students. But they should. Allow me to elaborate. When …
Maybe Common Core isn’t targeting what students need at all. The modern workplace and lifestyle demand that students balance cognitive, personal and interpersonal abilities, but current education policy discussions have not defined those abilities well, according to a special report released this afternoon by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in Washington. You …
I couldn’t get past reading the first paragraph: The core of the changes are new, tougher national grade-level standards, adopted by Arizona in June 2010. They revamp what skills students must learn and when they learn it to match their peers across the country. Arizona students must take the new national reading and math exams …
