Remembering Our Readers and Writers

This week, I forgot my students. In fact, I think I forgot them this marking period.

With multiple testing sessions and snow days creating a haphazard schedule of reading, writing, and thinking, my classroom lacked a necessary flow state for the past few weeks. I'm not proud of that.

But I am proud of my students, my readers and writers that do try so hard to tackle the difficult work I put in front of them. That's something that we often forget as teachers: we are the experts, and the tasks and texts we place in front of our students really are demanding. They just seem easy to us.

On my ride home from a teacher advocacy meeting, I remembered a conversation I had with a student today. He reminded me that he hadn't read a book since elementary school until my class.

No standardized test will measure that growth or change in his reading identity, but I know it exists.

Tomorrow I look forward to working with my students to tie up loose ends on their papers and whole-class texts. Until then, I'm off to search for next books on this kid's reading ladder. He's read one, and he knows he can't stop there--and I can't let him.

Comments

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo

What's your "gap plan"?

Brene Brown introduces the "family gap plan" in the fourth episode of her podcast, Unlocking Us . This came about when she and her husband would argue when she would return home from traveling. It seemed like the minute she walked in, her husband would expect her to be ready for him to "tap out," where she could take over where he had been supporting the family. While she was away from home, this didn't mean that she was full of energy and at 100% the minute she walked in the door. She had been working too and was exhausted. So, over time they began to name where they were at as people and as a family: I'm at 10%. I'm at 30%. They knew they needed a plan for when collectively she and her husband were not at 100%, but they needed to be for their family. Beyond our personal lives, the idea of a "gap plan" got me thinking about our classrooms and schools. What happens when we are not at 100% or we know that our classrooms or students are not

English's Education

Search This Blog