Teaching The Legacy of Dr. King: Fifty Years Later
I sit to write on the waning hours of April 4, 2018, fifty years after the assassination and death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was seven when we all heard the news of his death. Even at that young...
View ArticleThe Royal Wedding: Why Should We Care? One American Teacher’s Perspective
The news broke this morning: another school shooting, this time in Santa Fe, Texas. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to entertain the thought that this most recent massacre is the 22nd...
View ArticleA School Boycott Isn’t the Way To End Gun Violence
On this suggested school boycott-let's be serious. In The Atlantic, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested a massive nationwide school boycott to pressure our leaders into action to...
View ArticleOpinion: Age-Grading is Stupid
Age-grading is, in a word, stupid. It is built on a cultural conception of development that precludes the ability of individuals of different ages to have healthy, appropriate interactions and learn...
View ArticleIt’s time to talk about the culture of fear around standardized testing
The temperatures are warming. The skies are bright. The birds are chirping. Spring fever is in full effect, and everyone is awaiting summertime! Unfortunately for educators and students, there is a...
View ArticleOpinion: Why Teachers Shouldn’t Write Curriculum
The word “curriculum,” as it pertains to education, can include everything from the materials used to teach our students to the planned learning experiences. If we think of the Common Core standards as...
View ArticleIn Defense of Fairy Tales in High School
Last year, I taught The Princess Bride in my classroom, which is a fairy tale satire. To make sure my students understood what, exactly, William Golding was making fun of, we spent about six days...
View ArticleLet’s talk about Testing Anxiety in Children
I can still remember how I felt as I looked at the tears falling from one of my brightest students as she sat in her assigned seat for the Georgia Milestones Assessment last spring. Because I was...
View ArticleGetting Children to Understand The Value of Teaching Shakespeare
Every year, I get to the part in my high school curriculum where I start to introduce Shakespeare's Macbeth. And every year, the students complain. "Why do we have to read this?" "What's even the point...
View ArticleAssigning a Research Paper? Think About Rigor, Responsibility, and Relevance...
As English language arts teachers, we need to teach the language of doing business along with the literary arts. Thesis We teach literary research and other standard ELA concepts because students will...
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