I do not hide the fact that I am a fan of rock and roll. And, if you’re a Canadian of my age, that means being a fan of The Tragically Hip. That means being a fan of Gord Downie. Gord, as we all call him, in a very Canadian way, like we knew him […]
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Oh, the places you’ll go! Mentor texts for writing about a meaningful place
Each year, my students compose a series of brief writing pieces—each one describing a person, place, or thing. Currently, students are working on their “person” essay—a personal essay inspired by the beautiful mentor text, “The Stranger in the Photo is Me” by Don Murray. The essay is a meditation on memory and identity, and as […]
“Beautiful Oops”: Another Lesson in Making the Best of Mistakes
I thought I was so clever. I thought I had saved myself some time. Survey says…I was wrong!
A Tour of Mentor Texts for Middle Grade and High School Boys
On weekly visits to the library with my two-year-old son I often find myself browsing the periodicals in the children’s section. From there I can spy my busy toddler as he moves from the play kitchen to the dinosaur section to the puppet show. Recently I found myself drawn to magazines geared for boys and […]
No Happy Endings
“It doesn’t solve anything in an overly neat-and-tidy kind of way; rather, it honors the fact that sometime we are in a place where we are not okay.”
Mentor Text Wednesday: Poets Respond
Mentor Texts: The Poetry of Poets Respond, via Rattle Magazine Writing Techniques: Responding to current events Finding Inspiration Poetic Form Background: This post has been at the back of my mind for a while now. It’s not the first time I’ve written here about how our classrooms are places that we have to deal with the […]
Why This/Not That? A thinking routine to move kids from identification to analysis
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. […]
Have Tos & Mights: Making Mentor Text Noticings Concrete
Last year, I began to notice a curious but recurring pattern — students’ final papers lacked many of the elements we noticed in the mentor texts. It was as though students had forgotten that we studied the mentor texts for days and days and made grand lists of noticings. It was as though they had […]
Recommended Reading: Lynda Barry
If you’ve taken note of my Twitter handle, you might be curious about where it comes from. I didn’t join Twitter as a teacher, and my initial avatar was a drawing I did of a stuffed monkey that used to travel with my wife and I wherever we went. Being drawn to artistic pursuits, and […]
A Lesson on Beautiful Sentences
There is so much ugliness in the world. Enough to last us all for a good long while. As I was adjusting my classes this week, I thought, why not beauty? My AP students have been fixated on the weird and wonderful language in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. And frankly, I’m not over it, have […]
moving writers 