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.