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 […]
A few years ago, the writing in my classroom was floundering. Our department had been aligning curriculum for awhile and, in my rush to get my ducks in a row and “cover” everything, I had begun sacrificing key parts of my instruction. There just wasn’t time to fit it all in. One afternoon during a […]
My latest #movingwriters post on helping students write within word limits
I’ve written before about lessons inspired by my Twitter feed and it happened again early this week. Sometimes, right when you need it most, the universe drops the perfect mentor text right in your lap. My AP Language students are busy prepping for the exam and all of them need a little more work with […]
My second grader came home the other day and announced he needed to do some research. He was working on an informational book about basketball, he explained. Who am I to stand in the way of a researcher?? He plopped down and got to work. Soon, he had a document filled with all of the […]
I try to avoid teaching students formulas for their writing, but sometimes giving them a go-to formula for thinking can help them organize their writing independently.
I had great plans to help my students organize their writing lives. Things didn’t go quite as planned, but their writing lives are alive and well!
I’ve been scrolling through Twitter a lot these past two weeks. I can’t look away from the news and everything I read is prompting new questions and new things I need to research. Saturday, someone tweeted a poem by Naomi Shihab-Nye, Gate A-4. It’s a beautiful story of an interaction between two women in an […]
moving writers 