Category: Learning
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Art Comes to You
In my first years as an English teacher, bringing art into my classroom took a lot more effort than it does today. Of course there were pictures in textbooks (some of them even in color) as well as poster and postcard reproductions, but to get a really good look, I wanted big pictures, glowing with…
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My Hope for Students
The end of the 2019-2020 school year was, to say the least, unconventional; to say the most, it was awful! Community building is a huge part of my classroom environment and “office hours” via Zoom meetings just don’t compare with the face-to-face, one-on-one interactions we have while physically at school. The anxiety we all felt…
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Constructing and Locating (Creative) Freedom
transcript: “When given a completely blank canvas I feel constrained. When I am told what the boundaries are, and I have a place to focus, I feel actually free. In terms of this…and I’m really just thinking through this out loud. If they [learners] never feel freedom, and the experience of freedom in this context…
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“A Powerful Discourse on Love”
During the Pages fall retreat, 15 educators and teaching artists gathered in a room with visual artist and scholar, Ann Hamilton, as she led us in a “choral reading” deconstructing Bell Hooks’ essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” Hamilton worked with educators and artists to think about how we might creatively approach a challenging…
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A Pages Lesson to Leave With
Creative writing is a must. This seems obvious enough as I finish my fourth year in the Pages Program, but if I am being completely honest, creative writing had dwindled to practically nothing when I sat in on my first teacher collaboration session. Over the years, I got lost in the standards and the need…
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Blacking Out Robert Frost
You know when you’ve done a lesson so many times, it’s become muscle memory? You can just walk into class, set-it-up and then just go-! Poof! Wonderful lesson, wonderful class period, etc. etc. We all have those, right? Right? I have been teaching this Robert Frost Unit for the last few years; a couple times…
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Group Projects
Uniting 40 people with one project is not an easy task. It requires compromise, collaboration and patience. I’m happy to report our class successfully created a group project that added some life to our dull hallways and paid homage to the film, Anthropocene. Our goal was to create something beautiful with recycled materials. We quickly…
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POV
The most compelling element of Anthropocene was its use of point of view. The extreme close-ups of intricate, organic designs that we realize are images of destruction as we zoom out. Luscious, luminous patchworks of jewel tones that zoom in to reveal poisons in our water. The first person point of view, riding a motor…
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Strengthening Memory Through Arts-Integrated Experiences
What do we remember? The blur of objects, a yellow bird, a clown, polka dots, the dead owl, a monkey, the plaid shirt, stripes, colors, a wall of inflamed sayings, marbles on the floor, thousands of nails mapping fragile bodies of water. We remembered how we felt as we looked, up high, down low, somewhere…
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Handwritten Pages
I still find evidence of my past when cleaning out a desk drawer, when flipping through a book from a previous class, when rediscovering a journal. I relish opening the pages, reading and remembering who I was and what I thought through these little written time capsules. From which name I used to mark the…
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An Essay in Pictures
I worry sometimes that we are losing a little more of our creativity each time we work through the writing process. Typically in AP Literature and Composition, we write and we write; we read a book, then we write a paper. Writing becomes less about expression and more about a culminating essay to earn the…
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Designing Better Rubrics
Rubrics are useful for giving students straight feedback that reflects their performance and for showing them where they need to stretch their skills. They can be task specific or general. It is necessary to share general rubrics with students before they engage in the hard fun of your class (example: practice reaching learning targets measured…
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Know Thy Student
How much, a young mentee educator asked me, must I know about students in order to be most helpful to them? This was my response: I need to see what engages and inspires my students so I can help create buy-in and encourage student ownership of our learning and our work together. Understanding student motivation…
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Educating for the Good Life
Once, a colleague happened to be looking at a sample question from the latest Science standardized test Ohio students are mandated to take and for which school districts and educators are judged. I had no idea what the questions was asking, or, more importantly why it was asking it—that is to say, why being able…