That carrot is huge

So, that carrot I was talking about…it’s this: If you finish that essay by the end of the day, or if you bring it in, complete, at the beginning of class on Monday, I will let you erase one grade from my gradebook.
For many of my students, this is a great opportunity — they [...]

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 [...]

Light speed — NOW

I made an error in my planning. While I think the Caste System assignment was good and smart, and that the students produced some fantastic materials (both written and visual), I did it without thinking about the upcoming paper on the elements of literature.
Every year we teachers have the students write to a common [...]

Thesis Statements (the quick and easy way)

As promised, here is the powerpoint I used in teaching my students how to build thesis statements.
Most of the information is lifted directly from a variety of websites, but the example paragraphs are compiled from the opening paragraphs my students wrote when comparing and contrasting the short story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” with its [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Caste System in School

As much as I complain about my students, they really surprise me, and today we took that Marxism discussion even further as we compared the characters in three textx by talking about how their class levels influence their actions.
The first story is Born Worker, by Gary Soto, where we meet young Jose and his cousin [...]

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 [...]

This is Bullshit!

Or, Beating a Text to Death
A conversation with the science teacher led to this: we think our kids would profit from our classes if we could be more up front. And not just in the cussing realm, but in the personal honesty realm. If the two could coexist, we might just be able [...]