My husband is in a grad school program that requires a lot of writing. He likes to write, and he’s a good writer, so that’s not a problem….except he also works full time with crazy hours and we have two small-ish children. He’s just juggling way too much. So I was not surprised at all […]
It’s second semester and my AP Seminar kids are knee-deep in their official Performance Tasks. For those unfamiliar with the AP Capstone program, that means my kids are doing giant, independent research projects and I am required to take a very “hands off” approach. I can give general instructions to the whole class, and I […]
Twitter never ceases to amaze me for its ability to come through with exactly what I need at the right moment. This week my students are studying Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and my colleagues and I wanted to pair it with some modern satire. Though Swift’s text certainly has some shock value (eating […]
Around this time every year, I start channeling my inner white rabbit. As of today, I have 3 months until my kids will sit for their end-of-course exams. If you subtract a half week for mid-winter break, a week for spring break, three days for state testing, and another three for a giant field trip […]
My first year teaching AP Language, I was overwhelmed by the grading. The class culminates in a three hour exam; for two of those hours, students are writing three different essays. The amount of prep your average student needs to confidently bang out three essays asking them to do three different things in two hours? […]
I came home from #ncte17 full of ideas, but one common theme from the weekend was…..farts. In my first session about engaging boy readers and writers, Jon Sciezka gleefully told us that he loved fart jokes and writing about silly things. Then, I stood in line to a get a book for my 8 year […]
Our school has committed to working on addressing mental health issues with our students this year. Our students are carrying heavy burdens and we–the adults in their lives–need to figure out ways to help them cope with them. So, when this popped up in my Twitter feed last night, I naturally thought of my […]
When I started teaching AP Lang, we did a lot of vocab. I gave a monstrous list of “tone words” and students learned 20 each week. I quizzed them weekly, and then we marched on to 20 more. It was not good. Some kids adored it. It was concrete, and they could pad their grades. […]
One of the biggest challenges in teaching rhetorical analysis is teaching kids to move beyond identification to actual analysis. I have found over the years that when I teach kids to look for certain things, they find them!! If we talk about repetition, they can track it down. If we talk about parallel structure, boom. […]
Last week I started the year with my AP Seminar students talking about perspectives: our own, those of others, and the ones forgotten or ignored in texts. Much of the success of their research will be dependent on their ability to see issues from multiple perspectives. Imagine my excitement then, when this popped up in […]
