On any day last week, a quick sweep of my three senior classes offered the same scene: gaunt, gray faces; foreheads on tables; backpacks exploding with papers; hair teased and tangled by frustrated fingers. It’s the October crunch, and my seniors are feeling the pressure of first quarter assessments, college applications, and fall SAT testing. […]
I think what I liked most about middle school was the fact that I had two English classes: Language Arts AND Reading. Now, as a high school English teacher with three sections of an intensive literature course, I often think back to middle school and wish my classes were twice as long so I could […]
“I’m crying in the middle of this Panera Bread”: not a comment I imagined I might need to add to a bank!
Remember how Olaf, the snowman from Frozen, sings about how excited he is to experience summer after Arendelle’s deep freeze? Consider me his opposite. As summer (and summer writing!) approaches, I, ever the Wisconsin girl at heart, am thinking about snow. Seriously. I’m thinking specifically about a snowman-size snowball, the kind you make by rolling […]
I have two full weeks of classes with my seniors before their IB and AP exams begin, and after a semester of preparing students for those exams using methods I described in January, one of the biggest questions on my mind is this: how can I help students write as sensitively, authentically, wisely, and sophisticatedly […]
As the daffodils start sprouting near sidewalks and the draft in my apartment warms to where I don’t feel compelled to don a housecoat at all hours and become more of a Rose Nylund than I already am, the longer, sunshiny, pollen-y days give me the itch to experiment. In the last two weeks, my […]
Full confession: I wanted to say something profound, to share some brilliant new teaching strategy that had emerged from my classes over the past month, but as I sit down to write on one of the first sunny days of a very gray February, I’m feeling a little tapped out of great ideas. Like Hattie, […]
IB exams begin in early May, and I’m a teacher who loves to settle into a discussion when the ideas are good and they just keep coming, so if you asked my students to identify an external conflict in the drama of senior year of IB Literature, they would say “Ms. Jochman vs. the calendar.” […]
If you read the #NCTE17 recap, you know that the Moving Writers team has busting a move on the brain, especially me, since I am currently taking a second round of swing dancing lessons (so maybe it’s more like I’m “cutting a rug”?). This dance class crosses a long-existing item off of my bucket list, […]
The title of Anne Lamott’s book on writing, Bird by Bird, comes from a family story that a favorite colleague of mine also liked to tell when she was helping students get started with their writing. As Lamott tells it, when her father saw her brother overwhelmed by the task of a report on birds […]
