What Should Teachers Know?!   It's not always easy picking the right information out when your planning the next semester or school year! This year, change that. Check out this great guide that will help address middle and high school classroom teachers, administrators, and parents immediate need for basic information about how to build ...

One of my criticisms of NCLB is that it causes too many schools to focus all of their attention on the bottom 25% of a school’s population while ignoring the middle- and upper-level students. Some of the effects of this focus in my school are: fewer upper-level course choices in order to create more lower-level courses, larger [...]

Two novels I taught this year were To Kill A Mockingbird and A Gathering of Old Men. Prior to and during reading these novels, I had the kids look at some songs, poems, and historical context. Here are a few of my favorite things concerning the race relations in the novels. Prior to reading To Kill [...]

I purchased some movie units from Michael Vetrie, an alternative high school teacher in Sun Valley, CA, and I’m going to try one tomorrow. I will show The Matrix in half-hour segments, so the students can do the following: compose a double-entry journal, study the film using literary terms, analyze critical quotations in the novel plot how ...

While I assess diction analysis papers, personal essay, and literary analysis essays this week in the evening, I have scheduled enrichment films for my students. Here they are: Reading A Gathering of Old Men Malcolm X Separate But Equal Mississippi Burning Reading Frankenstein Edward Scissorhands Frankenstein Reading The Iliad Troy 300 Any ...

When teaching denotation and connotation I use numerous poems in addition to the literature we are reading (The Crucible’s use of “cold” is an excellent example if you are reading it, which we just were). Here are three I use with my classes: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (also great for alliteration) He ...

I often comment that educational solutions cannot solely be a responsibility of the schools. Communities must take the reigns and help solve many of the dilemmas facing education, and the ETS seems to agree with me that poverty may be the largest obstacle to overcome when creating academic success. Here are some of the highlights from [...]

To follow my previous post, here is another exercise I use with my students regarding adjectives. First, I put a list of words on the board all synonymous with “angry:” mad, upset, incensed, perturbed, enraged, disgusted, indignant, annoyed, peeved, infuriated, provoked, and irate. If I have the time I sometimes give each small group ...

One of the first sets of literary devices I teach at any level is connotation and denotation. These are two of the most basic diction analysis techniques for students to learn since they are wide-reaching and allow students to discover tone, mood, inferences, and more. Denotation (the primary definition of a word) and connotation (the [...]

Some weeks ago, a person from the early childhood department was visiting my classroom, and she saw me doing story time using the repeated interactive read-aloud strategy, so we talked about how it works, and I offered to do a little workshop on it for the other pre-K teachers in the district.  She said, “sure”, [...]