Brainstorming about Teaching

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?