Welcome to our series of Friday Teacher Scenes where Ethical ELA features teachers’ stories from their classrooms and experiences to contribute to and shape the public narrative of what it means to be an English language arts teacher in today’s sociopolitical climate. We hope to …
Our seventh grade class began the final quarter of our year together with a closer look at rhetoric, specifically how a speaker earns the audience’s attention and trust (ethos), how a speaker moves an audience to feel (pathos), and how the speaker persuades and teaches the audience with jargon, facts, examples in the hopes that those who listen will consider the issue in a new way or be moved to act (logos).
School started on Wednesday. We started our time together talking about the differences and similarities between “liking” and “appreciating” books. We did not take notes on this discussion, but the more we talked about the denotation and connotation, the more we came to understand the …
If you are like many teachers on Facebook and Twitter this summer, you are reading a lot of great PD books about collaboration and technology and new methods and the “best” strategies. Maybe you’ve spent your own money on materials for your classroom library (e.g., color-coded …
A seventh grade boy came up to me during reading class the other day, stepping away from his browsing on Goodreads for his next book. He said after reading a review about one book, “This one reviewer said he fell into a deep depression after …
Reading is personal. What we like, when we feel like it, how we like it — or don’t. Sometimes I read slowly and carefully, pausing to let an idea sink in or to get a tissue or to text a friend who’s read the same …
“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 …
by Lesley Roessing I considered myself to be a very involved middle-level ELA reading teacher. I loved to read, and I loved to share books with my students. I book-talked books that I read and thought some of my readers would enjoy reading. I continually …
Katrina is reading on her belly, sprawled out on the classroom floor, red hoodie tied around her waist, Jacqueline Woodson’s Feathers in one hand and a pencil in the other. A pad of sticky notes is off to the side with the words “Jesus Boy” written …
At the end of the 2015-16 school year, I wrote a proposal to be considered for a Chromebook pilot in our junior high. In 2017-18, our school district would be a 1:1 school, but this school year (2016-17), the district was looking for teachers who …