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 [...]

Dumbing it Down?

We’ve been worried about dumbing down our curriculum for a few years now. At the same time we’ve also ramped up the amount and quality of writing we expect from our students. It’s a conundrum.
Here’s the prompt we’re giving our kids for the fall assessment — and we’re only giving them three in-class [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Showing knowledge through peer editing

A few weeks back, Dana Huff wrote a post on Best Practices for Teaching Writing, and I’ve gotta say: I’m a sucker for teaching posts. This one is well worth the read, and I’ve definitely taken to heart the ideas she brought up in her post. And the best part is that she [...]

Lesson; Revision; Reflection

After spending a good deal of my weekend grading a series of papers form the students (compare and contrast papers on “The Ransom of Red Chief,” including the Venn-diagram outline, and the elements of literature worksheet they completed in preparation for this paper), I came to a few conclusions:
1. The kids can write more than [...]

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 [...]

shhh….

(this trick got me 140/160 essays)
If you happen to have, in your pockets, something which can be plugged into your ears and which holds all of your illegally downloaded music, and you promise not to let them become the focus of your time in class today, then I don’t see them. If these [...]