My pre-intern is ending his time working in my classroom, and I have asked him this question: "Are you sure you still want to be an English teacher?" I asked him this question with a hint of sarcasm, but also one of seriousness. The Michigan Education Association published an article about "The Disappearing Educator" that I think all teachers and those involved in education should read. Where are we going? The answer is leaving teaching and not choosing to become a teacher in the first place. We have all heard the statistic in education about teachers leaving before they reach five years. I would argue that teachers are in jeopardy well beyond five years. Put us on the endangered species list. 

The only thing I remember of my grandmother is her hands. I was four when she passed away, but I am also said to be just like her. If you hold up her 15-year-old school portrait and my 15 year-old school portrait, they are mirror images. Besides the physical make up of our bodies, we are also said to have the same mannerisms....grit, determination, and being way too stubborn. Our story is many peoples' stories. One of the reasons I love talking about writing is the commonalities we have in being human. Now, I won't ever know my grandmother, but I use the stories that I hear to get to know her on a deeper level. 

This post and I go back. Wayyyy back. I have been dreading to officially write this post because of how strongly I feel about this topic. I'm going to get to the point. Here is the main question: should students be taught MLA or Modern Language Association standards in the secondary classroom? If so, when? How old? Now, before I go making some folks angry about MLA, I want to go on record. I do not care if you teach MLA or APA, but one of them needs to be taught, and I would argue that the sooner the better is the most beneficial when it comes to education and developing young writers. 

I hope you are ready for some great reading! These authors-to-be took this assignment to a whole other level. By focusing on critical literary elements like plot, character, conflict, and setting, students were able to express themselves creatively. I paired this with a simultaneous academic piece so students could write in both modes: creative and academic. The creative mode focused on them making their own Dystopian World after reading Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. They also did a compare and contrast academic piece focusing on modern American Society vs the Dystopian World setup by Westerfeld in Uglies.  This second piece contained contained cited evidence, formal tone, etc. 

The research unit is my favorite unit of study, but it is also the toughest for a variety of reasons. Students are granted the freedom to do their own research and not given all of the materials needed to produce a piece of writing (our curriculum is heavy novel based with literary analysis). In sixth grade, they get to choose from a list of topics that are focused on a theme. Choice is still an option, but with limitations. Students need freedom in their writing to make choices, yet restrictions to allow for structure with the assignment.

The main components of the checklist include lessons on:

1. Plagiarism

2. Source Evaluation

3. Resource Location

4. MLA Formatting/Other Format

5. Great Student Exemplars

Essay Packet: a workbook for students that contains all the steps of the specific essay assignment included; life saver for the teacher of writing; communication method for parents

In part 5 of the Compare/Contrast Essay Series, we explore the beauty of rough draft feedback.

Time for the handing back of rough drafts! Students have put together their introduction rough drafts, body paragraph rough drafts, and conclusion rough drafts to form a first draft of their Compare/Contrast Essay about the topic:

Is our modern American society more similar to or different from the Uglies Dystopian Society/World?

My love-hate relationship with technology in the classroom continues as I reflect on the use of Padlet for conducting a peer review. I like visual feedback. I like looking at how different people respond to writing, and I like seeing how different teachers use feedback to help their writers improve. Students created their first rough draft of their Dystopian Compare/Contrast Essays for a peer review after they participated in a Conclusion Workshop.

Welcome to the second part of the series The Essential Guide to a Compare and Contrast Essay! Today, Advanced English 6 and I went through our adv-compare-contrast-essay-2017 packets and checked off what we had accomplished so far.

The assignment? A compare and contrast essay. The goal? Survive. While this seems dramatic sometimes, most of my students are really excited about their creative writing assignments that involve creating their own dystopian worlds. However, many are not as excited as the complementary assignment of a compare and contrast essay with comparing our modern American Society with the Uglies Dystopian Society. I have a secret...I may be more excited about the academic formal paper (and you know I love creative writing). This will be the introduction to a five-part series about how to craft a Compare and Contrast essay with a focalized topic.

One thing that I observe with my mentee pre-service teachers is that they are often scared of movement in the classroom. If students are moving, they are hard to control. If students are moving and talking...well, gasp! How does one come to terms with student movement and volume? The best answer is to work activities with accountability into daily lesson plans that allow students to get up and move! Movement + Accountability=Magic.

After doing some reflection over break, I got to thinking...how can my students remember the setup for the claim and the punctuation? CLAIM-TERPILLARS OF COURSE!

For the first book review on the blog for educators, I wanted to discuss a book that unexpectedly has changed the way I teach writing. I am a secondary educator; however, after working with two elementary teachers one summer, I noticed that this book was ALWAYS in their stack of books needed for writing camp. They carried this thing around. It was marked; it was annotated.

I found this paper feedback gem during a one-on-one tutoring session. I flipped the paper casually over and found this desperate declaration written on the back. The student was mortified. I died laughing. This is one of the reasons why I made this blog. I want students to embrace how they feel about something-even if it is boring or challenging-and take that mindset and make it great.

I can't take credit for this phrase. I have used it often throughout the course of my teaching career. It has become an iconic phrase for a mood that either I am in, the student's current state of mind or behavior, or both. The struggle bus is a metaphoric phenomenon that demonstrates a person's ability to cope with life and the ability to be an educator at the current moment. This may take the form of an academic lens, social behavioral lens, or even your spiritual or emotional lens of current being. The struggle bus is not a way of life, but a means of transportation for action and feeling in a current moment.