Blue-Sky Teaching

In early March my kids and I moved into a new house. We loved the layout  and the quiet, wood-filled backyard. Once we moved in, we began personalizing the inside with a few updates and paint.  And as soon as we had a nice day outside, I got a can of bright turquoise semi-gloss and painted the front door. For a minute I wondered if this color was a little too much for my neutral neighborhood.  But that quickly passed. No more almost driving into our neighbor's driveway for me.  The house had been stamped with my personal style. There have been times in my career where I've graded assignments that made me die a little inside.  Paper after paper that read almost like duplicates of each other. No variety. No personality. No life.  Either the topic hadn't engaged many of my students, they didn't understand it, or it was just bad timing - not the right writing for these kids right now. As I thought about my new house, I thought about how it must feel to be a student

I remember the moment several years ago when I sat, book lying open in my lap, stunned as memories punched me in the face, hard. I had just read the part of Eleanor and Park where Eleanor successfully escapes her house before her stepfather smelled her little brother's urine.  She had fallen asleep next to him as she tried to comfort him the night before.  She's wearing the same clothes as the day before. She has no backpack. She also hasn't combed her hair or had breakfast.  But she's on the bus, going to school. How many times had I spoken to students who had shown up with nothing for school?  How many times had I said, "You must bring your book to school.  Your notebook.  Your pen." or "When it becomes important to you, you'll remember to bring it"?  I might have said it kindly, or I might have said it with exasperation because it happened a lot. At this moment I realized that it didn't matter how I said it.  What mattered was th

Grades are tricky.  They're powerful.  Yet they're often not.  They're meant to inform about progress.  Yet they often don't.  They're used to motivate.  And, yet again, they often do not. In my class I want to communicate with students and parents about students' growth across the semester.   M any skills we work on are recursive, not one time objectives easily demonstrated on a single assessment. What does it tell students and parents when they see “C” on the report card?   What does it tell me, their teacher about what they’ve gained and what they need next? What does this letter mean in terms of success in the larger worlds of school and beyond? Nothing. I can have two kids getting a C if I average my grades.  Let's say 75%.  One of them has gotten 95% on half of our tasks and 65% on the other half.  The other student has been a straight 75% the whole way through.  And yet on the report card, they look exactly the same.   Still anoth

I look around my room during independent reading time to see still bodies, pages slowly turning, minds deep in thought.  It's taken a long time to get to this point in the school year, the point where I don't have to give anyone the evil eye, put a reminder hand on a shoulder or whisper, "How's it going?" not as a check-in, but as a "Please read your book."  We’re at the point where my students are genuinely into their books, books they have chosen because they have a solid ideas about what they like and what they want to read next.  How did we get to this point?  Very simply with time, choice and the belief that every kid in my room is already a reader deep inside, even though they might not know it yet.   I, as a professional who knows how important time is, made the decision to start every class period with increasing amounts of time to read. I was un-waveringly insistent, smilingly persistent, and, to be honest, sometimes a down-right, fire-br