Across the globe, folks will celebrate Earth Day this Saturday (April 22) with lots of community clean-up and educational events. Let’s bring some of that spirit to our classrooms with a high-interest, easy-to-deliver lesson that’ll get teens thinking about the world outside themselves. Continue reading
Last week, I shared five easy ways to help you celebrate National Poetry Month in your classroom. Today, I’m adding a sixth solid (and free!) resource. Continue reading
Teenagers are self-absorbed. I get that. (Heck, most adults we know are also pretty focused on themselves, no?) Nevertheless, I’ve been troubled in the past few weeks with some of my students’ inability to give concrete examples as they try to support their opinions. Continue reading
The Supreme Court is in the news today, as Judge Neil Gorsuch was officially announced last night as the president’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat. Looking to emphasize the importance of the court in my students’ lives, I launched a discussion last week about the upcoming changes to the bench and what rights […]
One thing that surprised me during last spring’s testing season was the heavy use of computer-voice instructions and listening passages on our state’s Common Core-style exam, the SBAC. I hadn’t really taught listening as a specific skill set, yet my students’ scores told me that they needed help there – badly. Continue reading
Last week, Stanford researchers released a “bleak” report showing that more than 80 percent of students can’t determine the difference between real and fake news. (Alas, it seems this is something adults struggle with, as well.)
The severity of students’ lack of media literacy was shocking to the study’s authors who were “taken aback by students’ lack of preparation…Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite.”
What to do about this? I’m going to start by Continue reading
My school’s hallways are abuzz this week with the creepy clown ridiculousness that’s sweeping America and now, it seems, the U.K.
In April, the Modern Language Association folks revamped their suggested citation formatting to be a better fit in our digital age. The release of the 8th edition of the MLA Handbook gives us quite a few changes to help students manage the mound of electronic resources now available and, while these changes are super-helpful, they made my old lesson materials completely obsolete. So what did I do on my first week of summer vacation? I took to the pool with a copy of the new MLA handbook. True, the excitement never ends around here. Continue reading
`Tis the season for graduation speakers to start preparing remarks as they’ll soon populate podiums across the land, hoping to reach the hearts of our freshest graduates buried under all those layers of polyester. Continue reading
While co-chaperoning the Competition Civics state meet earlier this month (a favor to my hallway bestie, the team’s adviser), my stupidity was embarrassingly apparent. The weekend was filled with two dozen of my school’s sharpest seniors citing Constitutional case law as they debated with actual working lawyers and I pretty much stood around the periphery, pretending to know what in the world they were talking about. Continue reading
