I left teaching this year after seventeen years in the classroom. Â It was a typical midlife crisis, and my job was only a small part of why I wanted to get away from it all to do something completely different. And yet, the students that I taught last year and this year were someone different […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Are You Using Interactive Student Notebooks? You Should Be!
Teaching full-time English and AVID found me drowning in papers – you know the feeling? A weekly stack of hundreds of papers to check off or grade left me frustrated, tired and unhappy most weekends. In an attempt to cut down on the overwhelming, mind-numbing amount of papers submitted to me by my middle school […]
Accountability Conversation
I am interested in educators taking back the conversation regarding education. Of course, we need to always be “developing” (sorry about the HEDI reference), and the vast majority of us always are partly by nature of the lifelong learner, but also because of what our nation is doing to it’s most vulnerable. We, teachers, aren’t […]
The Grieving Year: A Major Professional Error
During the 2014-2015 school year, I landed a brand new job. This teaching gig seemed to be exquisitely designed for me. I had just received my Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, and I was excited by an opening at my county’s most prestigious arts school. The job ad for a creative writing […]
Summer Reading For Teachers: How To Fly A Horse
One of the most engaging and sometimes infuriating side effects of being a teacher is that we  see connections to teaching in the world around us all the time. We are constantly aware of how a trip to the museum or the beach could be a field trip, how TV shows portray school and teachers […]
Reading Outside of the Canon: Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes
Why this novel? At the end of the year, I ask my students to write advice and words of encouragement for next year’s class. I present their wisdom during my first-day-of-school presentation. For my juniors (both honors and regular), this phrase (or something similar) is the most common: Read Nineteen Minutes. Out of all of […]
Adventures in Real World English/Language Arts: The Planning Stages
I adore literature. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved books (I blame Beauty and the Beast). And eighteen years later, I am teaching American Literature and British Literature, it is a dream career. Then this summer things changed. The state of Louisiana realized that not every student is going to college, and […]
Strategies for Establishing Positive Teacher-Parent Relationships
The importance of parent involvement in education has been studied extensively over the years, and findings show that by involving parents in a child’s school experience, children will have a more positive attitude about school, will make more effort to perform well, and will persist more with schoolwork (Jones & Jones, 2016). As such, parents […]