The Plight of a Red State Teacher

I have watched the direction in which our GOP dominated legislature and governor are leading the state regarding education and I am feeling rather hopeless. It’s not just in my state, but public education is in trouble in every red state in the union.

An 8 Step Collaborative Essay Lesson Plan Tailored to Your Student’s Needs

Let’s face it. Many of the prompts your state provides for your students are boring. The students will diligently write to the prompt, but the prompts are usually out of touch with current issues or topics that interest your students. So what is the answer? *Note: Before you launch this lesson plan, be sure to

For the Teachers: 5 Awesome Websites!

School starts back in a few weeks for me, and I spent the summer attending some really cool conferences (mostly Advanced Placement).  One of the most important things I discovered at these conferences was the websites that the teachers use to enhance their classroom learning environment.  Sure, you could pay some website a lot of

Teaching: Why It Is Not What It Used To Be

Today’s letter on the A to Z Blogging Challenge is “T”, and if there is something that has been on my mind lately it is teaching.  A few weeks ago, a retiring teacher Gerald Conti posted to Facebook about the teaching profession as it stands today.  The letter went viral.  In it, Conti cited the

Language Is Not Learned In Whole But In Part

As an English teacher I have noticed that there is one method of teaching children to read that needs to be completely eradicated from every elementary curriculum in the country: the whole language reading method.  The Whole Language method that is often taught in elementary is a method of sending large lists of “sight words”

Common Core Reading Simplified

Since today’s blog must begin with the letter “C”, I must write about the newest craze in education: Common Core State Standards. I have been teaching reading and writing for 15 years and for most of that time I was given a set of standards by the State of Oklahoma called the PASS guidelines.  These

Student Writers Living In Poverty

In the many years I have spent in the classroom, I have been through several modes of thought as a teacher and most of these modes were originally brought on by the way I was raised. I grew up in a home with parents who did not graduate from college but who had a high

Get Your Bluff In: 5 Scams Used By High School Students

I would like to begin this post by saying that I am not trying to bash students at all, but expose some of the lies that student tell teachers to either (A) get out of doing work or (B) blame their mistakes on others.  Most of my students are hard working, inquisitive, and caring people

5 Perks of Being a Public School Teacher

I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there that have many negative things to say about being a public school teacher: from the horrible pay to the mistreatment by legislators out of touch with the classroom to the violence that could be visited upon any school.  I, however, would like to list 5 things

3-2-1 Assessment: A Common Core Method for Assessment

One of the things that we try to steer away from when teaching using the common core method is to get away from wrote memorization, teachers answering questions for students and basic surface learning. Assessment, or testing, usually takes the form (in my class) of an essay or a multiple choice exam.  I decided to