Analytical Thinking and the Modern High School Student

I am one month into springing my common core lesson plans on my 11th grade English students.  They seemed to be doing quite well with it, but today I said something to them that caused them to completely flatline. This all began with an essay I assigned last week.  They were given a poem (a

Creative Writing Techniques for the Essay Writer

In my years of teaching students how to write well formed essays, I have seen my fair share of texts written with boring verbs, humdrum descriptions and lazy constructions.  In order for a student to rise above the chaff of the mediocre scribblings of others, that student must understand that there is much to learn

Feeding Squirrels: Taking AP Students to Do Research at a College Library

Yesterday I took my AP students to the University of Oklahoma Bizzell Library to do research for their critical perspectives paper.  Their assignment is to read a canonized novel of their choosing and then write an analytical research paper viewing that text through a critical lens (i.e. Marxist, Feminist, New Historical). Each year I take a group