Tag Archives: Teacher
All Ninth Grade, All The Time
This is my first year teaching only 9th graders all year, as in previous years, I’ve been teaching juniors or seniors during the same year as well. Since I’m also on the 9th grade advisory team, this means that I’ve been immersed in this particular freshman class, which luckily happens to be a really wonderful …
Random Bullets of Grading Exams
Reason 14,950 I love teaching freshmen: they write me little notes in the margins of their exams, with exclamation points and smiley faces, and make little jokes about the questions and their answers Quandary #1: if my students do very well, on average, on a section of their exam, is it because they studied effectively, …
Teachers, Students and Facebook
If you are my Facebook friend, you know that I am a frequent user of the site, checking in several times daily, posting pictures, commenting on statuses and syncing my music playlists through Spotify. I utilize all the site’s privacy features, but I definitely do a lot of communicating on Facebook. If you’ve been around …
702
For each of my three classes, I’ve graded thirteen assignments in this first quarter, including regular reading-based homework, a presentation, short formal writing and a vocabulary test. Since I have 54 freshmen this quarter, that means I will have graded 702 assignments in the first quarter of the school year. If I keep a similar …
Review: I Read It, But I Don’t Get It
Decision made: I ended up going with I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers first because it had some direct application for a project I’m working on with a colleague this summer. We’re developing a proposal for a summer program that would target struggling readers/writers in the first two …
End of Year Gifts
I got the best end-of-the-year teacher gift recently. No, it wasn’t a gift card, or a box of chocolates, a pretty scarf or expensive perfume, though I have gotten all of those things before. It came in an envelope, didn’t cost a thing, and will be a gift I treasure forever. The parent of one …
Blogging With My Students
Way back last August, I wrote a really optimistic post about all the new endeavors I wanted to try this year in my teaching. In the spirit of reflecting on my teaching being one of the main reasons I still blog, I wanted to look back at this list and see how many I actually …

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