Procrastadabbler

No offense to English teachers, but you make me nuts. I can say this because I earned an undergraduate degree in English, hold a certification in English education, and was an English teacher. But I am so very sick of all the kvetching about the wretched state of youth writing skills and how they are [...]

[Read more]

I have been working with a teacher and her students in a bilingual urban high school. We started out with the essential question of “what happens when cultures meet?”  We started by reading the book, Morning Girl and discussing the differences between Puerto Rico of 1492, Puerto Rico of today, and Rochester. We wanted the [...]

[Read more]

This semester I had my undergraduate students write a narrative explaining their view of the nature of literacy. I’ve done similar assignments in the past. I scaffold it in class yada yada. What I did differently this year was rather than just end it with a written assignment, I’ve had them record it as a [...]

[Read more]

Last weekend was the kick-off meeting for the Genesee Valley Writing Project, which is part of the National Writing Project. I’m lucky enough to have been selected as a fellow for the inaugural year.
One of the things we’ll be doing this summer is demo lessons. I suffered trying to come up with a demo lesson. [...]

[Read more]

I didn’t really “get” tagging until just recently. It was the whole commonplace book thing that helped me have my aha moment. I’ve been thinking about how to go about creating my commonplace book and how to do it electronically as well as on paper when it came to me that tagging is the way. [...]

[Read more]