My students treat grammar as an exotic species of butterfly to be frozen and pinned on the page. They can label the type of sentence and all the bits and pieces with studied precision, fretting the difference between verb or verbal, or degrees of adjective and adverb. Thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t know…
My students and I just survived 18 hours of sitting still, sitting silently, and filling in bubbles. Yeah, it’s high-stakes testing time. Yawn. I keep thinking of that fish in Finding Nemo who keeps howling “Bubbles! Buuuubbbbbles!” But standardized testing can take the fun out of anything, even bubbles. Maybe…
Dear Parent: Yes, I have also noticed your son’s grade has taken a rather sudden and precipitous slide, going from an A- to a C- in just two short months. I’m sorry that I cannot agree with your prognosis that he’s struggling with the material, however. His skills are fine,…
A cyclist rear-ended by an SUV so hard he flipped onto his back and skidded 20 feet frets about the frantic driver, and whether the man will lose his license. A girl hides her stoner Dad’s stash and lies about his activities to the point where she develops amnesia and…
I’m in the process of selecting three finalists in each class for our personal essay contest. At stake: a $35 Amazon card (thanks to parent donations). I have many F students who pulled As and Bs and made the finals, and many more A students who got Cs and Ds….
I spent the first day of Spring Break sleeping and playing video games. I read a few personal essays and learned a lot about puke, snot, and blood. It would seem 8th grade boys shed these particular bodily fluids quite profusely and take it quite seriously. At least their stories…
Scene: 3rd period class. I am trying to explain Shakespeare’s bawdy language without being bawdy. Me: There have been complaints about my language, so I can’t say certain things anymore. Kid 1: You mean like ‘crap’ and ‘sucks’? Me: Um, no, I can’t use those anymore. Kid 2: Can you…
I’m sorry I had to give you that F on your rhetorical analysis. It’s a difficult thing, ripping apart someone else’s words in the search for meaning. You had a hard time with Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech, and now Frederick Douglass has you stumped. But free speech doesn’t come…
The brain loves it some mighty rhythms. You know when you’ve connected to a song, you can feel it. Your foot does its tap-tap, your heart thumps to that bass. You nod. You clap. The music is all around and in you. What if you could achieve that same effect…
I teach writing, or I try to. My 8th grade students can prove fairly resistant to such time-honored techniques as revision, turning on spellcheck, and, um, that whole thing where you, like, don’t write run-ons and stuff because that would be wrong or something. Like that. Plus fragments. I give…
Recent Comments