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School’s Out for Summer?
Whether or not to preserve summer vacation or move to a year-round school calendar is a debate that springs up from time to time in education circles, and apparently, that time has come around again....
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In the Middle
Like my friend Anjali, I’m thinking a lot about MIDDLE SCHOOL, which my girls will be entering this fall. And yes, something about it just requires all caps, as it proving to be a more terrifying...
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Tuition, Motivation, Grades, and Me
So you’ve probably heard about the study recently that found that college kids whose parents pay for all/most of their expenses get lower GPAs, right? This gets me where I live for a number of reasons,...
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Book Review: With Rigor for All
Cover of Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics) With Rigor for All, Second Edition: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature addresses the issues many of us English teachers are tossing...
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Tracking Students with E-Textbooks
English: Textbook (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The hot topic in education today is how technology is going to shape, track and modify student behavior, especially in areas that are typically hard to...
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Summer Schooling
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraphs, not in lines or stanzas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Instead of choosing some professional development books to read...
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MOOCs, Redux
After making a strong start with Modern Poetry (nicknamed ModPo) last fall and feeling really enthusiastic, I ended up crashing and burning midway through the semester. However, since it was completely...
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Teaching Beowulf: Gathering Links
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraphs, not in lines or stanzas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Just as I did in preparing to teach Persepolis, I’m gathering links...
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A Forest of Vocabulary
Vocabulary – Words Are Important (Photo credit: Dr Noah Lott) Like many English teachers, I’ve gone through a whole bouquet of ways to teach vocabulary before settling on what (I think) will be my...
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Parent-Teacher Conferences
It’s that time of year; just as my parent conferences are approaching and my teacher conferences have already passed, the New York Times enters the fray with a debate section about parent-teacher...
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Beowulf and Reading Journals
Now that I’ve finished my round of teaching Beowulf, I’m really quite pleased that we added it to our curriculum this year, and especially that we chose the wonderful translation done by Seamus Heaney:...
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Flipping Out (My Classroom)
Spoiler: this post is longish and details a technological/pedagogical innovation and my plans for trying it next year, not me destroying my classroom in some kind of Hulk-Smash moment. Sorry. We’ve got...
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Wrap-Up: My Time at NCTE 2014
As a first-time attendee, I did not know quite what to expect as my department headed to the annual NCTE convention, but even if I had developed detailed expectations, I’m fairly sure they would have...
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