“Hey, Isa! Isa!” I call as I ride the wave of students heading to their lockers before school. Finally, she turns and stops at the next break. “Good morning. I missed you yesterday and thought we could work on your speech for today. Maybe you …
True Lies and the Patience to Dialogue Toward Truth
Leo “I can’t stay after school. I gotta pick up my little brother,” Leo says as he comes in at lunch to do a reading assignment. (All names are pseudonyms.) “I understand, but you missed a week of school, and if you can just stay …
7 Reflections to Quiet the Ghosts of Grading’s Past
Grades are letters that conflate the learning from the entire semester or quarter. I have to assign a grade for my seventh and eighth grade readers at the end of every quarter, and I struggle with this every time because their learning defies such neat, …
Miles for Motivation
Students are sometimes afraid to attempt assignments or feel that a grade is not worth the effort. Some have even said, “I don’t need the grade. I already have an A or a B”; “I don’t care about grades”; or “I just want to pass.” But I think that the success of this contest was due to the sense of community and the excitement of competition.
NCLB and Genocide: My First Year as a Teacher
Happy Holidays! Thank you for being a part of Ethical ELA this year. At Ethical ELA we consider the practical alongside the ethical – always asking what is good and right for the human beings with whom we are entrusted (and for us). I began …
A Loving Test: It Matters How You Assess
“I love test days,” I say to a classroom full of bewildered eighth graders. On each desk is one copy of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and a 2 page, 2-sided test. “What?” I hear scattered across my audience. “I’m gonna …
9 “Whole” Weeks of Free Choice Reading
What would happen if we let students choose everything they read in our-their English class? In the past, I would begin every school year with a shared text. My thinking was that if we could have a shared experience, we could come back to the …
How are you growing as a reader?
We are four weeks into the school year. Our reading classes are focusing on a few specific standards. The first one is learning language in context; the second is reading a variety of text; the third is reading closely; and the last couple are speaking …
10 Steps to a Short But Meaningful Welcome Letter
When it comes to composing the welcome back letter to parents and students, we also have to think about how we can blend the practical and ethical. Communication is so important when it comes to nurturing a community that values learning in and beyond the classroom, and with technology, there are a lot of ways to do that, which can be overwhelming, become time consuming, and ultimately distract readers from the important ideas you want to emphasize.
Standards, Curriculum, and a Writing Philosophy: What Can You Do Without Me?
What is the difference between standards and curriculum? Standards are one part of my curriculum. I’ve written about standards-based learning. This year in my 7th grade composition class, the writing standards –features of a narrative, argument, and informational essay — guided my instruction for the first …