I walked into my classroom the first morning of Teacher Appreciation Week a bit groggy and bleary-eyed from a terrific weekend – a weekend not spent grading or lesson planning, but instead, spent taking long walks, baking, and digging in my garden. There’s nothing easy about teaching first period English in junior high school – […]
Search results
Posted inFrom the Front Lines
7 Hidden Reasons Teachers Deserve a Pay Raise
Across the country, teachers are fighting for their rights to a fair salary, and for good reason. If you think teachers don’t deserve better pay because you truly believe that they only work from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, you’ve clearly never met a teacher. Teachers today do so much more […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Teacher Requests Her Students Not To Be Tested
I have had the immense fortune of being able to be in front of children in many different capacities for 25 years. Â It truly humbles me to know that for 25 years, parents have trusted my professionalism, training, care, creativity, and judgment when it comes to their children. My experiences include both regular/general education, and […]
Posted inUncategorized
Who Will Care for the Teachers?
When I sat down to write this piece, my purpose was to scribe a thinly veiled, autobiographical accounting of my own experience of surviving the middle school classroom while I struggled with depression. However, wanting to avoid the cathartic-memoir trope, I planned to include information on the prevalence of depressive disorders among classroom teachers .I […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher, Common Core, Educational Apps, From the Front Lines, Instruction & Curriculum, Technology
Creating Excitement In The Classroom With Hyperdocs
Have you explored using hyperdocs in your classroom? I hadn’t either, until I attended the CUE Conference in Palm Springs, California. The CUE Conference is the largest (this year topped 7,000 attendees) and oldest (35 years and still going strong) conference for educators interested in using technology to make a positive impact in their classrooms […]
Posted inUncategorized
Love and Hate for the 5-Paragraph Essay
When I taught high school English, I worked hard to help my students avoid and move beyond the five-paragraph essay. In fact, I almost went crazy trying to pull better-than-five-paragraphs-essays out of my seniors. I was apt to tell students, “you are stuck in a five-paragraph box! GET OUT OF THE BOX!” I swore I would […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher, From the Front Lines, Middle School, Parents
Balancing Teaching and Mothering
I’ve always been a working mom. I guess I should qualify that – I’ve always been a work-outside-the-home mom. Since I was in my thirties before I had both children, I spent several years teaching before they rocked my world…and to be honest, it was a struggle to figure out how I could balance it […]
Posted inClassroom Management, Featured, Instructional Strategies
Teaching Happiness Habits in the Classroom
By Guest Writer Michelle Wood I guess I consider myself a life coach, maybe, but I don’t know if that really captures what I do. (Does any title really capture all that we do?) I am a high school English teacher, a secondary new teacher mentor for my district, a health and wellness coach for […]