Have the teacher dreams started? Does your heart pound when you see the school supply section at Target? While you’re relaxing on the beach, have you defaulted to lesson planning over novels? To help calm your nerves, I’ve compiled notes about five top things every teacher should do before school starts – and guarantee you’ll […]
effective teaching
Posted inConfessions of a Teacher, High School, Instruction & Curriculum, Special Education
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 […]
Posted inFeatured, Instruction & Curriculum
The Benefits of an Individualized Approach
I’ll never forget the first year I started teaching. I was slightly skeptical of the whole process, although I believed in it (because I am the product of the Montessori school I now direct) millions of thoughts swarmed my head. “Teachers are ‘guides’ in the classroom and educational process,” “How am I going to keep 40 […]
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 inFeatured, From the Front Lines
Teaching With Fibromyalgia: When You're Too Tired to Move
Sometimes I wake up exhausted and so sore that I feel as if I lifted a thousand weights the day before. The exhaustion alone makes it difficult to get out of bed, but the pain really makes it difficult to move. After hitting the snooze button three times, I get up and get myself and […]
Posted inFeatured, From the Front Lines
Teaching With Fibromyalgia: When You’re Too Tired to Move
The teaching profession, as all us teachers know, is exhausting most days. You do things like greet students happily, come up with engaging lessons, put students in collaborative groups, deal with sassy students without losing composure, prevent students from getting into fights, go to meetings that last an hour or more, handle student behaviors during […]
Posted inFrom the Front Lines, Instructional Strategies, Opinion
The Counter-Productivity of the Testing Mentality
The other day, I came to team planning with some really great exploration activities and math tasks for students to use to deepen their understanding of the concepts we were learning in class. As the person who writes the formal lesson plans for our department and a graduate student, I take my job seriously, and […]
Posted inClassroom Management, Featured
Hold That Pen! 5 Things to Try Before a Write-Up
Classroom management is a huge part of being an effective teacher. In many schools, administrators judge effectiveness with classroom management by the number of times you write-up a student. Aside from this fact, there are several good reasons not to write students up and send them to the office. First of all, if you write-up a student […]