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In Defense of Differentiation

A tweet hit the internet this week, claiming that differentiation was failing our students, essentially tracking them as early as elementary school and cutting off access to greater success in the future. If any of my lovely readers has the link, please send it! A friend showed it to me on her phone on Monday. As a passionate differentiator, that tweet hit like a punch to the gut. But before I…

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That "New Teacher" Feeling

That “New Teacher” Feeling

Folks, I am a fish out of water this year. I have taken on Yearbook as both a class and club, and let me tell you, it is HARD. I did not anticipate how little of my English class experience would transfer to teaching writing for publication. It is humbling and horrifying. It is also a good reminder of what some of you may be feeling. And what most of our students feel all the time. This novice…

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Confidence Before Learning

Our world is so focused on opposites, kids learn from an early age that if you’re not “this”, you must be “that”. There is no gray area for them developmentally, and many members of our society never grow past this either-or thinking. Too many of our students come to us beaten down by a world that believes you can be only smart or stupid. Living in a binary world is harmful for many reasons, but…

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What I Learned From a Virus

Hi friends! My apologies for not writing regularly yet this year – COVID finally found my home. So, I figured that this week’s post will be about what the virus taught me about myself, about learning disabilities, and about compassion. Every person responds differently to COVID. In my household of four people, we had four completely different experiences. What was universal, however, was the…

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I Always Forget

Welcome back teacher friends! My apologies for the late restart to the blog. I always forget how crazy the first weeks are. I also always forget that they don’t talk. All the conversations in teacher common areas have been about the agonizing silence we face each period as kids feel us out, and it’s a stark reminder that they don’t know us yet. We have to build relationships before we can do…

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A Work/Life Balance

Or: I’ll see you in September Happy last week of school! At least here in New Jersey. After I finish packing up my room (Next year I get a WINDOW! – Yes, this is a real thing in public schools – we don’t all have windows), I will hand in my key and swipe and I will not do any more work until August, when I will spend about two days setting up my new classroom (in future years it will be an…

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Paper or Electronic?

COVID changed everything in education. Also, the sky is up and water is wet. One of the things it most visibly changed for my classroom was how much we do electronically. This year and last year, that number was 100%. Finals is this week, though, and as I fought with various “free” online quiz services, trying to make an engaging final (sounds like an oxymoron, but maybe next year I’ll share…

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Conferences: Not as Hard as You Think

Alright friends, here’s a big one: conferences. What they can look like, how long they take, and how to make time for them. This was definitely the most intimidating part of switching to a work-in-class model for me. So here’s the TL;DR: Keep them short. Way shorter than you think.Progress conferences are far more important than summative conferencesThe more quick ones you do, the better…

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Taking Responsibility vs. Taking OWNERSHIP

Story time! Gather ’round, children, and be regaled with a tale from the Adventures in Business Ownership Series by the Held Family. Once upon a time, a couple owned a family business in the trades. As word got around about their commitment to high-quality work and attention to detail, their business grew, and it became necessary to hire employees. Having never been bosses before, they didn’t…

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What the Hell is an Anchor Text?

Teacher Confession: I spent years teaching what I claimed was a workshop model reading classroom without knowing what an anchor text was. I delighted in giving up the whole class novel; I reveled in it. I bragged to all my colleagues how much better the classroom was without it. (I still believe 100% percent of this, by the way – the percentage of kids who get what you want out of a whole class…

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It's Elementary, My Dear Secondary Teacher!

It’s Elementary, My Dear Secondary Teacher!

Things I know about adolescents: They’re kidsTheir brains are changing at a speed only comparable to when they were newbornsThey look like grown upsThey like stickers and high fivesTHEY’RE STILL KIDS Things I know about elementary school teachers: They’re geniuses, every damn one of themThey know how brains learnThey know how to engage a crowdThey know the importance of appearances (classroom,…

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Feelings First Teaching

Have you ever been treated like an idiot? How did you respond? For most people, adults included, the feeling of being stupid leads to partial or complete shut down of effort. If I’m doomed to fail, why exert the effort to try at all? This is extra true with adolescents. We must ALWAYS recognize what they have in them that will help them to succeed. Too much curriculum focuses on wrong answers,…

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Things I Know About Reading

I’ve been teaching English to teenagers for over a decade, and I have learned some things about reading. Reading is best when it shows us what CAN be.Avid readers are often looking for a window into another worldReading is SOCIAL. When we read something we love, we long for someone to talk to about it.The most prolific readers QUIT BOOKS as often as they finish them.Book snobbery is very real…

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Collaboration is Not Just For Kids

Do you know why I’m good at what I do? Because I hang out with people smarter than me. I have always loved co-teaching because I cannot work in a vacuum. I love bouncing ideas off of other people, and when those people share the same goals and situation, the ideas that come out of conversation are truly exceptional. I won the co-teacher lottery last year, and again this year. I was placed with…

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Don't Forget to Practice!

Don’t Forget to Practice!

Confession time: I use this blog as a way to crystalize my own thinking each week, especially when I struggle with something. This week, I realized I made a big mistake: we moved on from a skill and did not maintain it. In November, all of my students completed NaNoWriMo. They wrote every block period for an hour or more and wrote somewhere between 5000 and 35000 words in a month. It was pretty…

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Using Technology to Get Back to Basics

If you’ve read my other posts, you know that my focus is on simplifying teaching to drill down to the skills kids will actually need to succeed next year and beyond. This philosophy gives me a very complicated relationship with technology. In some ways, technology gives me incredible opportunities to dig deeper into helpful skills and skip over the things that paper-based, traditional teaching…

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Do What They Do

I was blessed to have truly talented teachers in my certification program. I may not have loved every class, but every single teacher gave me something to remember in my instruction. In my class on teaching writing, the instructor said “Write when they write.” When I was student teaching high school, the lead teacher told me to “read when they read”. It’s so simple, and yet we NEVER do it. The…

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