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!
Continue reading Lessons learned from my five years at John Champe High School
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:
Continue reading Predicting and dissecting this year’s AP Lang scores
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 intimidating classics gathering dust on our bookshelves. I’ve always been jealous that my younger brother got to take an entire class on War and Peace in college. I read Anna Karenina about ten years ago and loved it, but never made the time for Tolstoy’s other famous novel. It was a fact I was reminded of on a pretty regular basis, as I ended up with Johnny’s worn copy of the tome on my bookshelf. It’s a big austere and authoritative book, and every time I glanced over there it needled me that I had not read it.
My nomination was granted. The book club was on board — this summer it was just Adam and me, so it didn’t take too much convincing.
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.
Continue reading The End-of-the-Year Academic Shenanigans Report
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 with Schoology, I stand by my grade. Schoology is clunky but functional. While it’s not a total failure of an interface, it’s not nearly as user-friendly as Google Classroom, for high school teachers at least.
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 as much creative space as possible. Here are some of my favorites.
In the spring of 2010 I made a joke that landed well with the ninth grade class I was student-teaching at Atlee High School. I don’t remember the joke, but I remember the response of my (Catholic-trained) cooperating teacher.
“We’re not comedians,” he growled at me after the students were gone.
I think of that comment a lot. Our business is education, not entertainment. My cooperating teacher, who took his job as an educator seriously, wanted to make sure I didn’t lose sight of that. (Which is not to say he was a bore. In fact he had a fine sense of humor, and he shared it with his students often — but it never interfered with his instruction.)
Eleven years later, I still try to keep that principle in mind when my creative instincts and pedagogical impulses start to comingle.
Continue reading Ranking my experiments with the online medium, from least to most gimmicky
