Students have Opinions on Everything-- Except the Book.
Ask your students whether a hot dog is a sandwich, and suddenly everyone has a law degree. There are arguments. There are counterarguments. Someone is personally offended by someone else’s definition of bread. Ask what they think about a character’s choices, though? Silence.
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How to Make Vocabulary Practice More Meaningful in High School ELA
Vocabulary assignments can get painfully repetitive. Students look up the word, write the definition, use it in a sentence, take the quiz, and then forget the word by next Tuesday.
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Halloween ELA Activities for High School That Still Teach Real Skills
Halloween lessons can get a little…substance-free.
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Shakespeare Is Meant to Be Seen: How to Make Shakespeare Accessible (and Actually Enjoyable!) for Students
I love Shakespeare. I really do. But I also understand why so many students (and teachers!) absolutely dread it.
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15 Vocabulary Terms I Fully Expect Taylor Swift to Use on Her Next Album
Somewhere between clandestine meetings, calamitous love, incandescent imagery, and an entire song called “The Albatross,” she apparently decided that the SAT word list was also a songwriting resource.
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AI Changed the English Classroom. Our Assignments Need to Change Too.
I don’t think the answer to AI is making every student write every essay by hand. I also don’t think the answer is pretending nothing has changed. Because it has.
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How to Teach Annotation Without Creating a Highlighting Free-for-All
I love annotation. I also think we have done a truly spectacular job of making students hate it.
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Stop Telling Students to “Analyze.” Teach Them How to Actually Do It.
If I had a dollar for every time I wrote “analyze this further” on a student essay, I probably be writing this from my yacht.
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