Several times a year, my school offers intramural activities to students. Some of these are sport-like (dodgeball, frisbee golf), some are artistic (painting, poetry), and many just fall under the general "club" category (chess, , math). I, along with every other teacher, have just been asked if I want to run an intramural. The time commitment ( Read more... )

So, I have passed my State English Licensure Test (irritatingly, they don't give out scores if you passed, they just tell me that I correctly answered "most or all items" in every section and that my open response answers were "thorough"). That means that as soon as the process my request, I will be officially "highly qualified" to teach English ( Read more... )

So, tomorrow I need to take a state English teacher exam so that the school can identify me as "highly qualified." I will try to avoid getting into too much detail about how little this test applies to my job and my qualifications to do it well and just mention that the majority of the test involves needed to know roughly 100 authors from various ( Read more... )

Earlier this week, I gave my sixth grade English class a quiz on figurative language, including metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and personification. On the final page of the quiz, I asked my students to use figurative language to describe several characters from the book we are reading ( Read more... )

Not really a Quote of the Day, since I don't do daily quotes, but I loved this so much I had to share ( Read more... )

It was just pointed out to me that I never actually posted about my new job ( Read more... )

So, today I finished setting up my new classroom. It's small (my biggest class is 6 kids) so it was more of a space planning challenge than a decorating one. I finally did the English teacher thing and placed inspirational quotes by authors and philosophers around the room. I managed to work in a Neil Gaiman quote, which pleased me immensely ( Read more... )

I should preface this recommendation by explaining that I teach elementary and middle-schoolers and as a result read much literature intended for that age group. What I've found is that a huge amount of fantasy fiction, and a surprising amount of horror, is written for sixth graders. Much of this work is unexceptional, but there are occasional ( Read more... )

This is an interesting little quiz. The responses are unfortunately a little too cut-and-paste and contradict themselves somewhat as a result.


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A friend of mine recently posted a link to this article.

The article, from UK newspaper The Daily Mail, is titled Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims and discusses how some teachers are beginning to remove potentially controversial topics, such as the Holocaust and the Crusades, from their classes in order to avoid potentially ( Read more... )