Personal Journal

Brainstorming about Teaching

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Need to stop work on the memoir lesson plan that I’ve been restructuring to work on the Snapshots article I set as a goal for this week. The memoir lesson is for an interesting project that ReadWriteThink is part of that coordinates with a PBS documentary. More on that later though.

I still can’t quite zero in on the topic for the Snapshot. I have the start of a piece on student-centered assessment, but I think it’s more of an opinion piece than a Snapshot. Maybe it will work for the Speaking My Mind column actually! I hadn’t thought of that, but there’s another goal. Maybe I can aim for September on that piece.

But back to Snapshot, I’m going to brainstorm some teaching and learning memories to try to get a start. Here goes.

  • freon leak in the typing classroom
  • showing my parents how a reference book worked when I was in 6th grade
  • being told I should be a teacher in 7th grade
  • playing school with workbooks at home
  • sneaking into the computer lab with students
  • fitting work to students’ needs: grammar rules for ed students
  • “golden shovel” as an example of honoring students’ language knowledge
  • engaged research for student looking at Holocaust
  • summary versus analysis metaphors

I wish this weren’t such a difficult process. It turns out that I really should have kept a teaching journal. Or maybe if I search through my personal journals, but my hunch is that there’s nothing but angst and depression in those (and not over teaching but everything else).

I think I can go with the Golden Shovel though. In fact, I could easily spit out a lesson plan on that to go along with the column. I have the assignment, prewriting questions, and peer review sheet in my folders. Wouldn’t be hard to whip it out, and there’s that great reading of the poem on poets.org. Okay, off to writing that article I think. I hope?

Personal Journal

Creating another blog identity

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Finally created a second site for a different blog that I want to write. There’s some thinking I need to do about my messy existence that just doesn’t go in this blog, so I created a second one elsewhere, and have spent most of the evening trying to get the format to do what I want. It’s still not quite perfect, but I’ve finally taken the first step and done something anyway.

Personal Journal

August 9 Writing Projects

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I turned in the draft for Chapter 3 on Monday afternoon. It ended up at 45 double-spaced pages, and near the end, I’m sure that I started repeating things. I know that the last list of criteria used the verb “Include” in about 8 of 12 bullets. I decided it was time to just get rid of it for a while, and turning it in seemed like the best option.

Next I’m supposed to come up with a short piece for the Snapshots column in EJ. Here’s the call for that section:

Snapshots: What do the key moments of teaching and learning
look like? When did you know that you had made a difference?
What did you learn from a mistake or difficult situation?
For this feature, we invite you to capture one particular
moment in words. We are seeking reflective stories, drawn
from all types of classrooms, that reveal insights about teaching
and learning. Stories accepted for the feature will be published
with the author’s photo and may include other photographs as
needed (1,000 to 1,500 words).

I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to write when I put it on the schedule. It’s just a short story about teaching really, but I’ve been wondering now what story I have that is significant or relevant. I’m feeling as though I may not be able to come up with anything that matters. Maybe something will come to me.

In the meantime, I’ve been editing other people’s writing for the site. Last night, I came across a gem that included the instruction to post students’ final projects in the classroom “even the ones that aren’t so good.”   o.O   I’m trying to focus on the fact that at least she didn’t say “even the ones by the slow kids.”