Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

A student climbs a tree on Earth Day Today was Earth Day!  A joyous reason for me to act like a hippie and for that to be socially acceptable, and so I took full advantage of the situation.  Oh, and it is nearing the end of National Poetry Month, and it is Hump Day and the kids have been working hard, so what better reason to celebrate? I teach high school, three periods a day of English.  English is one of those classes that every one has to take (and pass) four years in a row in order to graduate.  I feel that it is my duty to make my classes as applicable to my students' lives as possible, to help them, through reading and writing, learn to think and communicate.  I also feel that the nature of my class gives me the leeway to get to know my students in ways that other teachers may not be able to--after all, through our writing and sharing as we connect to literature, we learn a lot about one another. And so yesterday, I realized that my students and I both needed a br

A Teacher's Reflection:  How My Post Masters Classes in Reading Informed My Practice ELL students clap for a fellow classmate after a presentation My Classroom (in 2009)            The teaching context is high school English language arts (ELA) and English language learners (ELLs).   My students are in grades 9-12.   I teach in a large, diverse school of approximately 2300 students located in Burke County.   I typically have between five to fourteen students in any given ELL class and between twenty to thirty-two students in an ELA class.   This past year, I taught an ELL course for novices just starting to acquire conversational English.   I also taught a reading class aimed at providing students with strategies to survive in their content courses like world history and biology.   I taught a communication skills course that focused on all the domains of language usage:   reading, writing, listening, and speaking.   All of my students were native Spanish speakers from Guat