This year on Moving Writers, I’ve spotlighted re-reads of some older books about writing, and not all of them by teachers. Together, we examined the writer’s inner life with the poet Ted Hughes, practiced memory writing with the book Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and honed our questions for conferring with the wonderful Barry Lane. […]
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 After The End by Barry Lane, the original edition. […]
Placing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and Craig Santos Perez’s “Good Fossil Fuels” side by side can elicit a wide-ranging classroom conversation about the ways the climate crisis is downplayed. Through describing points of convergence and divergence, students can ponder how the “recycled” aspects of Smith’s syntax and prosody appearing in Perez’s poem challenge their thinking […]
We are thrilled to share a new contributing voice today, Marcus Luther! We spied his smart tweets about student reflection in writing and begged him to write something for us! Marcus is currently in his eleventh year as a public high school English teacher. He teaches 10th grade English and AP Literature in Keizer, OR, […]
If you teach writing, you’re likely very familiar with The Writing Process. Not a (lower-case) writing process: The Writing Process. The exact wording may shift slightly, but essentially it’s the same standard sequence that one must follow in order to fully be a capital W Writer: you plan, draft, revise, edit, and finally, publish. It’s […]
In spite of my protestations to the contrary, I want to be the fun teacher. It’s just that often my definition of fun involves annotating or revising or learning etymology and that doesn’t consistently align with students’ definition of fun. After four months of what even I deemed to be not-fun work (various iterations of […]
You can hardly get online recently without seeing an article or other hand-wringing about ChatGPT and what this means for the world. Especially the English teacher world. Thankfully, Brett Vogelsinger has done some thinking about this. Instead of fighting against it, what if we could use ChatGPT and other AI to actually benefit our writers? […]
Sometime during the first week of school this year, I taped this note to my desk: I wanted this year to be different. Not just different than the last few years of COVID School, but different than all the other years of my teaching that valued efficiency and productivity almost above all. (I love efficiency. […]
This month @mrsablund gives you an awesome community writing event to give you a spark to your writing classroom and more than a handful of ideas to use tomorrow. Special thanks this month to @writeoutconnect #writeout @writingproject
When students are asked to introduce themselves in writing, it can be difficult figuring out the best way to stage this encounter between self and stranger, writer and audience. For my seniors who are drafting college application essays, the first attempt is often characterized by tentatively offered assertions about their motives for applying, or the […]
moving writers 