Visit Ruth Ayres Writes to share in the weekly celebration. Today I celebrate the kid who won’t. You know the kid I mean. He (in my classroom, it was almost always a he) slouches in the back row, makes wisecracks that you just miss being able to hear even though everyone else in the room…
(Thanks to The Styling Librarian, I just made my first quote poster using ReciteThis!) This Oscar Wilde quote popped into my head this morning as I was reflecting on part of last night’s discussion in Methods class. There we were talking about how to transform our students’ lives through literacy, how to help them view…
I have written before about my naivete as a first-year high school English teacher. I truly thought that my good intentions would be enough to carry the day. I loved English, so my students would too. Because we all know that the teacher’s enthusiasm is all that’s needed to motivate students to learn, right? I…
In her new blog feature called Teaching Tuesday, novelist and professor Cathy Day shared her technique for learning students’ names on the first day of class. I do something similar: I fill out a classroom seating map as my students go around the room on the first day introducing themselves with their names, hometowns, and…
If you ever want to get a conversation going in a Methods class for pre-service teachers, ask about their teaching fears. And before you know it, you’ll have a white board covered with fears ranging from school shootings to bathroom breaks, from wardrobe malfunctions to meeting standards, from grading papers to getting yelled at by…
My classroom was downstairs in the corner, but I was too excited about the first day of school to stay in it and wait for my students to come to me. So I stood in the upstairs hallway with Jane, the math teacher, a former nun, watching the kids enter the building. Jane used this…
