about me.
I’m a tech-loving, high school English teacher whose mission is to help students rediscover their love of reading. Even after 25 years, I’m still passionate about the classroom–as both a teacher & a Lifelong Learner.
my approach to writing.
In many ways, teachers are coaches. And because I’ve been with the franchise twenty-five seasons (even though I’m only 25 😬), I’ve learned so much along the way. Here are five key plays that inform how I approach writing in the classroom.
my pledge to students.
Before I can ask certain things from my students, I need to make some promises of my own. The first assignment every year begins with a pledge. I share my own list of commitments with the students, and then they publish their own pledge to me.
all i really need to know i learned in the covid classroom.
(with apologies to Robert Fulghum) In 1986, Robert Fulghum’s bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten reminded us to return to the basics. Fulghum’s premise was, if we just recalled the principles from kindergarten (e.g., share, play nice, clean up…
our break-up letters to 2020.
My Creative Writers keep Writers’ Notebooks, housing writing exercises we complete each week. Some entries are brainstorms, others are single-sitting warm-ups, and others are the beginnings of pieces we’ll develop at a later date. It seems fitting, then, that our final entry for 2020…
new year’s resolutions–covid edition.
2020 was, to quote CNN’s Jake Tapper, “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a trainwreck.” And others agree. Towns rang in the new year with literal dumpster fires; the Holderness family pushed out a Billy Joel parody about them; and one YouTube…
