If your district’s like mine, we’re both trapped right now in the long March toward spring break. Some days, we just need to catch our breath and Vanessa, my science department friend over at Biology Roots, has put together eight tips to keep in mind if you’re in need of a sub day. (#7 is my favorite!) Continue reading
Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who contributed to my daughter’s fundraising campaign. Back in January, she had the idea to replace two sets of sad, broken books in her middle school classroom with new copies. This week, those books arrived and were delivered to an incredibly grateful classroom. While the politics of […]
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
Each morning, I post a fresh sheet of “tearable puns” on the bulletin board outside my classroom door, and as the day unfolds a wide variety of kids (some of them are my actual students, but many more are unknown to me) swing by the board to help themselves to a daily chuckle. 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 […]
I came across this classic bit of goodness today and needed to share (click here for a larger version you can copy to your computer and print as a page-sized poster): Continue reading
I’ve been slow to embrace the idea of group essays. Several teachers I know use group essays, replacing one of the big writing assignments of the year with a group assignment where they place three or four students together and task them to collaborate on a single paper. This always feels like a cheat to me, especially when those colleagues brag in the teachers’ lounge they have only 11 essays to grade per class as opposed to the standard 34 or so. Continue reading
