Last month, I introduced two new means of reflection–a set of brainstorming questions inspired by Reading with Presence and a “poetry prescription” activity–that I hoped to implement in the weeks that followed. Today, I’m here with an update. Readers, they worked! The poem analysis letters inspired by The Paris Review’s “Poetry Rx” column were full […]
I often find myself telling students, particularly my seniors, that I am “throwing them into the deep end.” As the year begins, I may assign a task that’s beyond their skill or comfort to see how they perform. If things go awry, I try to figure out where the gaps are and fill them. As […]
Each spring, I use my discomfort with my school’s requisite summer reading assignment as a challenge: How can I make required reading work for my students and our wider community? How can I create some opportunities for student choice and voice that still allow some structure for evaluation? This year, I really thought I hit […]
“The CDC says…” so very many things, especially lately. It’s been a year of finding our footing and then having the rug pulled out from under us as national, statewide, or community guidance changes. We’ve been building the plane as we fly it and then hopping out of the plane with patched-over parachutes just as […]
My beat this year is all about teaching in the hybrid classroom, but I’m taking a break this month to share an outside-of-the-classroom project that could easily be adapted for in-person, virtual, or hybrid learning. Just two months before my city locked down, I attended a public forum about storytelling featuring StoryCorps founder Dave Isay. […]
“You know what would be a great thing to try in the middle of a pandemic and a gray, icy winter while I’m teaching in two places at once? Teaching a brand new text!” Said no one. Ever. And yet…here I am! Last spring, I sent a survey to the juniors who would be in […]
To quote a host from one of my favorite podcasts, “Taylor Swift, when will you let us live?!” While the question was uttered in jest, I imagine that some of us are feeling a twinge of envy or maybe regret at seeing T-Swift release two style-reinventing albums in just a few months while we’re clinging […]
This year, my posts for Moving Writers will focus on how I am learning to teach in two places at once as my school navigates a hybrid learning model wherein we have split students into three tracks: tracks A & B attend classes in opposite “two days in school/two days at home” rotations; students in […]
This year, my posts for Moving Writers will focus on how I am learning to teach in two places at once as my school navigates a hybrid learning model wherein we have split students into three tracks: tracks A & B attend classes in opposite “two days in school/two days at home” rotations; students in […]
Half of my fourth period IB English class has made it to our gathering place in a conference room above the gym (we can’t fit safely in my regular classroom). I look at them, seated neatly in spaced out rows, just laptops on their desks and very little else around them. Patterned masks and disposable […]
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