In my early years of teaching, I worked with a teacher named Rebecca who was a Socratic Seminar bad ass. She was known in our school and in our district as the mother of Socratic Seminar. I was known more as the teacher who could get any kid to write. We all have our badges … Continue reading
Your social studies teacher loved you. He loved you so much, he willfully ignored your lapses in grammar. He *knew* what you were trying to say, even when you didn’t say it clearly in your papers, so he gave you full credit for half-thought out papers. He overlooked the structural problems in your papers, too. … Continue reading
I have worked in education for most of my professional life. I became a teacher in the Fall of 2000, when I was 26 years old, after a few years of non-profit education work. With this in mind, the majority of my life has followed the academic calendar with its breaks, summers, and holidays. I … Continue reading
I am a huge fan of rereading. I used to think it was lame. Why waste time reading a book I had already read? There are so many new ones to read! Much like my theory that I can’t travel to the same place twice, I would not read the same book twice. But then … Continue reading
This semester I clawed and begged my way into a workshop with an organization called the New York City Writing Project. This organization focuses on how to teach writing to middle/high school students through a teacher-to-teacher dialogue and exploration of practices and under the strong belief that in order to teach writing you need to … Continue reading
One of the reasons I started this blog came from my experiences in attending The New York City Writing Project’s Satellite Institute this spring. One Saturday a month I meet with 20 other teachers and we work on our own writing, we learn new strategies to teach writing to our students, we read about teaching … Continue reading
I finally saw The Hunger Games film on Sunday night in a packed movie theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I felt like I was the last person to see the movie, but as I squeezed between a kind man who was a heavy breather and a large woman who was not thrilled that … Continue reading
