March 25, 2025 The college entrance essay: Should we teach it or shouldn’t we? This year, the guidance department of our high school, New Directions Secondary School in the Bronx, NY, asked me if I could teach a unit on the college entrance essay in our Juniors English class. In my career, the college entrance […]
Category: Application Essay
Writing is Not Monolithic
…these students had a very, very limited idea of what writing was.
Guided by (too many) Voices
It’s funny how a few things in school remain mostly normal despite everything else feeling so strange this year. Like the annual arrival of National Honors Society nominations– it was a nice reminder of “normal” when a student in my Zoom last week asked if we could set up a breakout room so he could […]
Using Images + Objects as an Entryway into Narrative Writing
Today’s guest post comes to us from one of our 100 Days of Summer Writing participants, Erin Palazzo. Erin is a high school English teacher in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. She loves helping teens fall in love with reading and develop confidence in writing through mentor texts and readers & writers workshops. Her students would also add that […]
