I love and hate test prep. Actually, I think I just hate test prep. No one ever went to college because they wanted to help students answer multiple choice questions. Yet it remains a ridiculously important part of school. It is a necessary evil, so I decided a long time ago that I better make the most of it. We…
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I remember how intimidated I was about interacting with parents at the start of my career. That was particularly unfortunate, because the second day of my career teaching was open house. I spent two hours introducing myself to my brand new students and their parents. I was terrified. I felt like a fraud and I was worried everyone would think…
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Middle schoolers often have a hard time with making inferences. It can sometimes be hard to help students make inferences because it is a very difficult concept. It is easy to have students provide you with evidence from the text when something is explicitly stated, but it is harder when they have to infer meaning from a text. As a…
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My friends always ask me a lot of questions about being a teacher. Well, they don’t ask. But they do offer brief pauses in conversation in which I excitedly leap in to talk at length about the minutiae of my day as if they had asked about it. And they sit there and listen because it’s my dinner party and…
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It is no secret that many of our students don’t come to us reading on grade level. I teach some students that could probably perform well in advanced high school classes. I also teach many more students that are not quite on grade level. And of course, I have students that are far below grade level. That’s okay. I’m certainly…
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