My AP Researchers are moving fast this year–they’re on a wild roller coaster barreling towards the Research Proposal Loop-de-Loop and it’s probably fair to say a few of them are already wishing they hadn’t had that third corn dog before they hopped on the ride. It’s okay though; they’ll all end up on solid ground […]
Nancie Atwell calls theme “the chilliest mind Popsicle” of all the writing lessons that young writers need to learn, and I couldn’t agree more. (Atwell, 2015, 101) Theme is one of the toughest lessons I have had to learn to teach in both reading and writing and by the time I did, I not only […]
For those students, taking any spark of enthusiasm they show and fanning it to a flame, and helping it spread to other possible enthusiasms, becomes one of my goals.
Writing is the act of asking yourself hard questions and then trying to answer them.
This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published. This month, I’ll consider an excerpt from the book Poetry Is by Ted […]
I’ll admit: I’m a sucker for beautiful notebook work. I will tell students that the quality of the thinking is really what matters — and I mean it. But I also swoon when I see gorgeous notebook pages. I associate gorgeous “two-page spreads” with Penny Kittle and the thinking she has been sharing with teachers […]
Thinking about our writing, big picture, helps us to think about who and how we want to be as people, and as we the people.
As the season of AP Lang exams fast approaches, I find myself more and more urgently seeking ways to help tighten gaps in my students’ skill sets. Fine tuning writing skills is a part of it, but when it comes to one AP Lang task–the Open Argument essay–there are more pressing issues that are a […]
I thought, There must be a key to good endings. It must be a skill – a teachable, practice-able skill.
The answer: Irony.
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
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