In our district, it has become obvious that a return to what school once was will now come in phases. And that means an interim period where we are, as my principal recently remarked, building a plane while also flying it. My student teacher and I departed that flight in phase one of our district’s […]
Instruction & Curriculum
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Painless Poetry: A Road Less Traveled
Painless Poetry “Gross! I hate this stuff!” “This is too hard, I don’t wanna do it!” “It never makes sense to me, it’s all so weird.” Then the calm voice of reason speaks- “Ladies, we have to teach it, it’s part of the curriculum.” What is this dreaded standard? Poetry. That single word would often […]
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Online Learning: Headaches and Heartbreaks and Whispers of “You’re Lagging”
You may have seen the meme on social media where it likens virtual learning to a séance: “Sally, can you hear me?”, “Bobby, are you there?”, “Knock if you can hear us”. I shared this meme with my students a few weeks ago after an incredibly frustrating week of teaching to a computer screen with […]
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Compassionate Teaching is Key Especially During This Pandemic
Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing tweets from users about their teachers and their online class experiences. These two stood out to me in particular: teachers be like "i know these are troubling times" then be the trouble during the times — Jeffery Perkins (@JefferyxBball) November 29, 2020 A student just wrote “My […]
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Rebranding the Dreaded Essay: How to Demystify Essays and Make Them Meaningful During COVID-19
Whenever students hear the word “essay,” they groan, eye roll, and plead for something, anything else. Similarly, most adults I know remember high school or college essays they grudgingly finished just under the wire; late-night coffee, obsessive word counting, and a fair amount of teacher-specific bs-ing. It’s clear “The Essay” gets a bad rap, and […]
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One Step At A Time: My Go To Lesson With Van Gogh’s Starry Night
My Go-To Lesson If I were to ask you what is your “go-to” lesson, I bet a dozen donuts you could tell me all about it! Well, one of my favorite ones involves several different variations of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Small side story – while visiting my son and daughter-in-law in Dallas, we took […]
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My Students Are Getting Me Through This Pandemic
I walk up the stairs trying to find the new weight room, the location of our school’s “rapid” Covid-19 testing area. My nose swabbed by a woman donned in full personal protection equipment makes me think of a scene from a dystopian movie. As I exit, I see one of my students arrive with what […]
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A Message from the Year 2040: How a Year of COVID Learning Forever Changed My Life
Twenty years ago, I spent my senior year of high school at home. Tens of millions of students shared this situation, and for good reason—a global pandemic raged across the globe for fifteen months, ultimately killing over two million human beings. I remember the recovery wasn’t at all what my classmates and I had hoped […]