After spending the summer researching assessment and grading, after meeting with colleagues and my principal about facilitating a no-grades classroom this school year, after resisting numbers and letter grades on student work for nearly nine weeks, after countless hours of writing narrative feedback to students …
Why encourage students to read comics in English class? Because reading comics is reading. Because comics are art. Because comics examine humanity and what it means to be vulnerable. Lifetime comic lover Paul Brzegowy talks about the story and art of comics.
On Fridays, I write a blog post for my seventh grade students and their families about what we were trying to do that week in class. On the first Friday of the school year, I asked students to reply to the post with a comment …
When we read literature about lives that seem too distant from our own, how do we minimize our tendencies to “other” the unfamiliar? In the middle school reading classroom, I have found that if we begin with the process of telling our own stories — …
When I was in high school, I kept a diary. It was where I spoke my truth, my inner most thoughts, but also where I wrote poems to boys who didn’t even know I existed and dreams for my life beyond the dungeon of my …
As teachers, we bear witness to the lives of students every day, and in journals, blogs, seminars, and over lunch, we read the lives of students as well. Because of teachers, students’ stories endure. We are a witness to their lives.
By way of introduction I am the paternal grandfather of a fourteen-year-old boy. His grandmother and I have provided day care for him since he was born. In the early years of his education he was diagnosed with A.D.D. which makes it hard for him …