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 […]
Every teacher has their own way of preparing for a new school year. I like to try out writing activities I might share with my students and see what I notice. What possibilities exist with this writing exercise? Is it something I could embed in all my classes? And a more interesting question of late–How […]
If you’re like me, you always have a project in the back of your mind that you want to try, but for whatever reason, you never pull the trigger. You keep telling yourself it will be a great project for the next unit, the next semester, the next year. But this is a warning for […]
Abigail takes us through a mentor text which has endless amount of uses. She gives you a quick guide to this perfect personification mentor and hopes you will try it out too.
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
If you’ve ever taught a bunch of self-conscious middle schoolers, you know that adolescents are perpetually embarrassed about anything and everything. You also know that they don’t just “get over it” when they realize that embarrassment is an impediment to their learning. In that state of biological and emotional upheaval, the rational voice (even when it exists) is drowned in the fear of embarrassment.
As writing teachers, we’ve done our fair share of writing ourselves. We each have our own unique process, a set of strategies we’ve grown comfortable with from practice. If you’re new to teaching writing, that probably means you did a lot of writing recently in college. Your process is finely tuned; you’re likely a well-oiled […]
A Brief Podcasting Primer If you don’t already know what a podcast is, it’s basically a radio show that people can stream or download to their own devices. It’s like listening to radio a la carte in that you can pick and choose what episodes you want to listen to–and you have the power to […]
Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states […]
Most struggling students have found themselves failing, and many of these experiences of failure become foundations to future embarrassment. This, then, becomes a huge deterrent to learning when the student begins to default to maladaptive coping mechanisms that serve them at the moment but are detrimental in the long term.
moving writers 