Everyone is obsessed with true crime lately. True crime podcasts, true crime TV shows, true crime movies, true crime documentaries. I feel like every time I turn around, I see another preview for another true crime series on Netflix. And, here’s the thing, I’m totally down for it. My podcasts, my list on Netflix – […]
A few weeks ago, I attended a webinar from Matt Glover and Carl Anderson on Writing Workshop. At the end of the webinar, Carl held a live conference with an amazing middle grade student. She wanted some help with her poem about her family’s annual trip to the beach, this summer during the pandemic. “How […]
Image via Davide Restivo on http://commons.wikimedia.org While designing a short story unit for my AP English literature students this past August, I was eager to identify stories that acknowledged the environmental challenges that we are currently facing. I’ve always had faith in literature’s ability to help us enter into an imaginative awareness of what others […]
When writers revise in our classrooms, it is vital that they have the guidance and the tools to empower them to do so. Between last spring and this school year, writing teachers have especially turned to a variety of digital tools to find ways to keep the revision process authentic, valuable, and productive. In a […]
My greatest hope is that amid this newness, the “I-feel-like-a-first-year-teacher-again” of it all, we can all learn some things about teaching writing that we may never have otherwise explored.
Last spring, when the rug was pulled out from under teachers and students everywhere, some things were surprisingly difficult, and others were much easier than expected. Though our teaching situations may be different, it’s the same deal this year, right? Interestingly, noticed a pattern last spring: if we had developed a routine around [insert stuff […]
Recently, my friend’s 10 year old son asked: “How is retirement going?” First reaction: ummm…say what now?! But he explained himself: “You are no longer going to teach kids in a classroom, so you are retiring from that.” And he is right…the teaching that I have been doing for the past 15 years is over […]
OUR MINDSET: To move writers closer to the center of their ever-changing identity.Educators and students have a lot to fear in 2020; there is no circumventing that reality. There have been jarring questions and radical realizations throughout this year and our sense of self has undoubtedly taken a hit no matter how well we have […]
I wasn’t expecting to start my 19th year teaching feeling this unprepared. Not the juggling of virtual and face-to-face hybrid teaching–I’ll bungle my way through that chaos, and it will be fine (right? Somebody assure me it will be fine). No, my feelings of unpreparedness come from all the other chaos in the world: racial […]
My best writing advice for teacher-writers (and my best advice for how to stay in the classroom for the long term) is to write about those problems, issues, and shortcomings that niggle you in the back of your head. Angela Stockman calls them the “pebbles in your teacher shoes.” Instead of a series of beautified […]
moving writers 