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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I knew my first year teaching would be difficult. I read books about classroom management in anticipation. I had nightmares that my students wouldn’t listen to me. I worried that I would run out of things for them to do in class and everything would devolve into fiery chaos. There was one thing, however, that I was wholly unprepared to…
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Every teacher has had a day where everything went wrong and you felt like you had no control over your class at all. One particularly horrifying moment in my teaching career was when I was walking an unruly class back from lunch. They were literally (and I am using literally correctly) screaming and lying down in the hallway. That moment…
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