Learning and Laptops

As Plato did for Socrates, as my students hope to do for our class, we are embarking on a well worn venture of scribing . Each year, I ask m...

Today was my youngest’s, Max (formerly known as Will- but that is another whole story)- first day to ride the bus home. Max had his special ...

This summer I found out I was going to be teaching another section of Spelling Vocabulary , a class we offer at AHS. Rather than teaching a...

Each year, we are asked to submit a professional growth plan that sets forth a growth objective and goal for us as individual teachers as we...

For the past three years, I have asked my students to participate in my No D Policy. No student can earn a D in my class- this ultimately me...

For almost the past year, I have taught a lovely young woman in Spain named Rachel . The learning environment Rachel and I have is ideal: we...

I think back to school for teachers is similar to New Year’s Resolutions for the rest of the world- it is the time to make promises, to get ...

Last weekend, I attended Learning2.0 up in Loveland and heard Amy White talk about some tools she uses in her classrom. I showed these to my...

After a long and drawn out approval process, our 9th grade Honors students were able to read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother after reading ...

Sometime during first semester, the date escapes me, Christian Long put out a tweet looking for someone to collaborate with his Texas stude...

Part of the ninth grade curriculum is for our students to write a persuasive research paper where students apply their composition skills to...

A year ago, I was entrenched in graduate school thinking about a message Gary Stager had delivered to our class. He indicated a profound ne...

Earlier this school year, I tweeted out a request for classes wanting to collaborate with my college preparatory English Literature class ....

Every week in English Nine Honors , students are given a set of ten SAT preparatory vocabulary words. Last week’s words were Bleak, Blight, ...

For the past three years, I have had my classes write their versions of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe ” segment. I was introduced ...

This past week, I wanted to get the kids thinking about the role of our government, who do they work for, what is the role of mass media, wh...

Over the course of my teaching career, I have discovered the value of individual writing conferences with my students. It is not as though ...

This year has been exhausting. More students, more preps, more demands of increased test scores on writing and reading. More, more, more wit...

I think make-up work is the bane of every teacher’s existence. No one I know likes the idea of kids missing class, and then having to relay...

This year, I added a new prep- Single Gender All Boys English Nine - yep, 32 boys plus Anne Smith in a first hour Language Arts class. This ...