The ingenuity…

Every. Single. Day those kids surprise me, and this time it’s around an actual assignment I thought just might be fun. See, when I gave them the Build-Your-Own-Caste assignment, I thought they’d go and do it; that they’d complete the essay and that they’d do the presentation portion, but what I didn’t realize was [...]

I found a note!

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how quickly students move back and forth between “pretending to be adults” and actually “being kids.” I think this note between two girls sums it up pretty well:

Girl 1: She knows how to fight and shes like just be like bitch herpiyes are cold sores and your abott [...]

Gary Soto and Marxism

I just knew the opportunity to teach a very, very limited view of marxism would come up in the classroom, but I was just hoping to find a way to frame it so that the kids could understand it. That opportunity happened today when we began reading the story: “Born Worker” by Gary Soto.
I [...]

Sorry about the [lack of an] update

So I promised I’d keep you updated on the progress of the summer session course, and this summer just whizzed past without warning. So quickly did it go that I haven’t updated in a month and some change; being a new daddy doesn’t help matters much, but I think there was no real news [...]

Their words, their voices

A good number of my students turned in their short stories this week. I didn’t spend much time going over how to write a piece of short fiction, and we didn’t do too much creative writing work (something I regret, and something I plan to do in the future), but the kids’ work really [...]

Why (sometimes) you’ve gotta love the way kids think

After showing off my exmple of creating a story from a list of characters, names, traits, storylines, and settings, one student came to me with just three things.
Character: A warrior
Name: Eshlyn
Trait: Conceited
And then we had the following conversation.
“I’m stuck after that.”
Why?
“I don’t know what to write.”
Ok, so…you’ve got this warrior, Eshlyn. What’s he fighting [...]

How to Create Your Own Story in the Oral Tradition

As we’ve been reading through this series of stories from the oral tradition, we’ve also been able to categorize the stories into distinct types. There’s the Hyperbole story, the Origin or Creation Myths, the Moral Stories, and the Urban Legends. Some of the stories only fit into one or two categories, and many [...]

The power and origins of storytelling

I think I finally hit on the answer to why my students have been acting up here at the end of the year — we were doing boring stuff. Sure, it was slightly creative, but it wasn’t constantly changing, and I wasn’t the only one running into problems. But in the past week, [...]

My favorite statement of the year

This is exactly why I love teaching 8th grade — you never know what kids will say. They say inappropriate things, they say caustic things, they say funny things, and they say sad things. They talk all the time and I try to share what I can when I get the chance, but [...]