Once upon a time I was a high school American Literature teacher who believed in the survey method of “these are the canonical works that all students should read before they leave high school.” I spent years patting myself on the back for getting struggling readers to love The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, and The Great Gatsby. We […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
I Don’t Teach To the Test, But I Still Play the Game
If you “teach to the test,” you are a slave to the system, right? I personally despise standardized tests, and in fact, when it comes to high school English classes, I would do away with midterms, final exams, and most typical tests altogether if I could. But since I do have to play the game, I […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Part 3: Adventures in Real Word English/Language Arts – Let Them Be Great
I love English Language Arts (ELA), but real world ELA can be eye opening. I have been teaching my Technical Writing class for two weeks now. And I have had my share of ups and downs. I’ve always taken myself seriously as an educator. My love of literature and writing always translates easily into the classroom. […]
Posted inChild Development, Featured, Instruction & Curriculum, Opinion
Group Work and the Introverted Student
“As children, our classroom desks are increasingly arranged in pods, the better to foster group learning, and research suggests that the vast majority of teachers believe that the ideal students is an extrovert.” -Susan Cain Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (pg. 6) How often do we as teachers assign group projects and […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
[Podcast S2E3] Why I Left Teaching to Poop in a Bucket
Introduction Welcome to Episode 4 Season two of The Educator’s Room podcast! In this episode, Franchesca interviews Christina Gil, former seventeen-year public school veteran about why she decided to use her mid-life crisis to leave teaching and go and live on a homestead community in rural Missouri. Every teacher has gone through it- days where you wonder […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
A Seventeen-Year Veteran Teacher’s Regrets: The Grade Game
In the many years I’ve been teaching, I’ve often wished that I could just have a group of students who smilingly followed my every instruction. But beyond instruction, one of my biggest goals as a teacher was to get my students to think for themselves. However, it was difficult to reflect that goal in my grading […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
#EdTechCorner: Owl Eyes Helps With Annotation
One of the ‘banes of my existence’ as an English teacher is having to teach classical literature and then watching my students struggle through every single line for basic comprehension. Twenty years ago, I’d pull out my trusty guides that annotated the work(s) line by line. These days though, with technology at the forefront of […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Why You Should Experiment on Your Students This Year
I have been a teacher for seventeen years, so yes, there are many lessons or activities that I have done exactly the same every year. I love my discussion on class and power in Romeo and Juliet, I have the same handout that I have been using for my sentence imitation lesson for twelve years, and I […]