Sorry kids, I just made this too difficult. Let’s fix that.

It happens every once in a while — that monster you spring on the classroom is more frightening than you expected it to be. You planned on turning that monster into a cute, cuddly stuffed animal, and instead you accidentally added another set of fangs, a tail made of glass shards, and chainsaws for [...]

Two things

First: I had my yearly evaluation the other day, and I thought it went poorly. Actually, I thought it went well, but in my previous evaluation with the same evaluator I found that I was lacking in many areas — especially classroom management. This is nothing new. I’ve had problems with classroom [...]

Worn Out Workshop — worries and wonders.

These past two weeks have definitely kept me busy, and I owe that to my favorite (and yet, least favorite) class activity — the workshop. The workshop is meant to keep the kids busy, keep them working, keep them learning new materials, and to get them to turn out a quality product on a [...]

So, how does this school really work?

After yesterday’s discussion about the Caste system in school, I whipped up a little handout to help the kids get their ideas flowing and in order about how the actual Caste systems that work in our schools.
Click the image below to download the handout, or click here to see the big picture.
See, the [...]

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 [...]

Open Book, Open Note, Open Friend

That’s how I prefaced the final for my class, which was built by the students and to which I added a few questions from the state test. They were allowed to use their books, their notes, anything inside the classroom — including friends — but they were not allowed to talk to the teacher. [...]

What do you do at the end of the year?

Add to that: What do you do for the coming year?
Now that we’re at the end of the year, I’ve been giving my students a lot of computer lab time — time to finish writing and printing their short stories, as well as time to help me build the final. I’m looking to the [...]

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 [...]

Never Forget

My students spent quite a bit of this semester learning about the Holocaust, and their research took them to real stories of real Holocaust survivors. In addition to watching video, exploring websites, reading plays and other documents of these events, the students delved into some pretty thorough research in an effort to make sense [...]

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 [...]