Reflections on Teaching High School Readers and Writers
TEDx Battle
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For months now, our team has been planning a TEDx event at my school. This Friday is IT! While it's been A LOT of work, it's been so worth it. The twenty-one students who are speaking are amazing! Check out my blog post here.
It's December and that means the end of the semester is rushing at us, faster than Joe Rantz's boat in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (sorry, just reading The Boys in the Boat ...fabulous, by the way). Despite the fact that I allow retakes on every assignment all semester, somehow the realization that it's December wakes up many of my students, and now the work pours in. There are also final projects, conferences, revisions, book groups, portfolios, grading (and more grading), study sessions, finals ... and stress. DID I MENTION STRESS?! Students are stressed. Teachers are stressed. And parents are definitely stressed. This is the time of the year when I wonder why I didn't take a sabbatical this year. I could be in the English country side, curled up next to 17th century stone fireplace that's hung with fresh pine boughs and ribbon, sipping a steaming mug of coffee, the snow softly falling outside the window, all while writing that book I've talked about for ...
My transition from being a middle school teacher to being a high school teacher was bumpy. I took a job in a brand new high school to teach a reading intervention class and 9th grade English at the very last minute (a week before school started) two years ago. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time - what did I know about teaching HIGH SCHOOL kids? Would I be too babyish for this job? So I marched in ready to be a REAL high school teacher. I would follow my colleagues and learn the ropes. Armed with Lord of the Flies , I began my first literature unit. It was a dismal, flat-out, fall-on-your-face failure. Most kids did not read the book. Most could not read the book. And most were not thinking at all. They were waiting for me to tell them, lead them, to "discuss" the book. Year one was SO educating and enlightening. And oh so wrong. My students did not read until we got independent reading going for real....
This week was difficult at my high school. We lost a teacher to cancer. A teacher who was young, energetic and cared so much about his students, his football players, his family. As I sat this morning in the warm September sun on the bleachers of our football stadium, I watched his young wife, their toddler sons, his parents. I watched the bleachers fill with faculty, students, coaches and friends. Graduates came back. Faculty who've moved on came back. And we mourned, and we celebrated Jon's life. Jon was pretty quiet in my eyes. We taught at different ends of the building and our paths only crossed occasionally. My first year, I got lost in his wing of the building, trying to deliver my keys so he and his class could change my car's oil for his automotive car care class. Not only did he change the oil, but he told me he was concerned about my tires being low and he didn't think I'd rotated them lately, so he and the kids ...
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