I’m half a year late in writing this, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the work of the late Professor Paul Cantor. I never met him in person, never took one of his classes, and obviously I didn’t keep up with him well enough to hear the news in February that he had died. However, I am compelled to express deep appreciation for the impact he has made on my teaching life. This impact all came via his “Shakespeare and Politics” lectures, a series of 57 hour-long lectures, freely available on YouTube, in which Cantor examines Shakespeare through … Continue reading My Shakespeare Guy

Students can very quickly learn email etiquette Starting in my second year at Champe I added a disclaimer in my syllabus that I don’t respond to emails that don’t contain a salutation, a polite message, and a farewell. I provided a model of what that looks like. No issues after that!  

After my students took the AP Language and Composition exam this May, I asked them to take a survey.  My goal with the survey was to answer a few questions: 

There are no War and Peace plot spoilers in this blog post I had always wanted to read it, so I nominated Tolstoy’s epic as the summer selection to the fellow members of my summer book club, which is composed of all teachers (members include Willard English teacher Adam Howells, Frederick County English teacher Joe Wengerd, and my wife, Jackie, who teaches elementary music and reads approximately twice as fast as me). A going concern since 2018, the book club has been a way for us to stay in touch over the summer as well as cover those unread and … Continue reading My big summer read

A few weeks ago I was visiting my dad in Southside Virginia, and I got a call from my Aunt Ann, who lives nearby. While organizing family photos during the pandemic, she had found some of the diaries kept by her paternal grandfather back when he was a teacher at the turn of the twentieth century. She thought I might find them interesting. She thought right. 

Here’s what I said yesterday at John Champe High School’s 2021 graduation (script is included below the video).

I’ve never been more interested in the results of anonymous survey. Last week I asked my students to tell me all about their academic shenanigans this past school year. I used the word “shenanigans” because it has gentler connotations than “cheating” or “dishonesty,” both words that probably describe the behavior with better accuracy.   

Last fall I assigned formative grades to the education technology that was keeping us afloat. Schoology earned a C+. I’m sure you remember my summation of the PowerSchool-owned interface, but in case you don’t…  Personally, I haven’t asked a lot out of Schoology, and my own gripes have been pretty limited in comparison to some of my colleagues. Next week, though, I’ll be using Schoology’s Turnitin add-on, which, by the way, is the third different iteration of that program in as many years. But for now, [the C+] reflects my own somewhat limited experience with Schoology. After a full year … Continue reading Schoology of hard knocks

We gave our Lang students a breather from essay-writing and asked them to craft a hype video that would hype them for their exam. In the spirit of never asking students to do something I wouldn’t do myself, I created a model. This is an activity you couldn’t have done a decade ago when I first started teaching, when students weren’t nearly as adept at using video-editing software. Many thanks to WeVideo and Flipgrid, which allowed for easy editing and uploading of the videos. TikTok was also, no surprise, a popular video-editing app. We designed the assignment to give students … Continue reading Hype videos