Years ago, I had a student who told me that I should have her uncle come as a guest speaker to my class. She gave me no prompt as to why he might be a good fit, or even what he would talk about but the class was called Sex, Drugs, and RocknRoll: a Study of the the Counter Culture of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, so I went with it. I was comforted by the fact that he was a teacher in Minneapolis, so I wasn’t taking a huge risk in inviting him to class. When he showed up, I learned that he taught theatre in a high school. He wore glasses, but he was missing one of the stems so they sat askew on his face. This was the 90s and AVHS was almost exclusively white, so his first comment to me was, “Wow! I’m in a White Palace here!” There is so much I remember about his talk that day. He was a recovering addict, so he had a few stories about some of his wild adventures. He talked about race at ...
For my Ice Breaker this fall, I have designed an activity around the vocabulary of empowerment. It’s fairly simple. I grabbed 50 words from the recommended SAT Word List that had connotations of positive outcomes (e.g. aspirational, buoyant, cerebral, illustrious etc). Students then look up their given word and have to look up its meaning and discuss with partners how the word might reflect a positive quality they could apply to their new school year. After sharing out their findings, I then spotlight the word “agency”—the ability to take action, to have control over one’s direction in life. I turn it into a lesson about how we don’t need to be defined by our environment or our past or the expectations of others, but by our own hopes and dreams. Beginning high school is one of those transitional moments when students can have the agency or autonomy...
Early in my teaching career, I was given the opportunity to move into the honors and accelerated English classes. It was an awesome experience, and I learned quite a bit about good and bad teaching through my experience with those very motivated and ambitious students. After a number of years however, I knew it was time for a change, and I transitioned into the role of a reading specialist and began to work with students who really struggled both with reading and with school. It was a dramatic shift. In my honors classes, students would want to argue over a point they missed on their essays, papers, and tests. In my reading intervention classes, students weren’t interested about how or why they lost a point here or there, they were more interested in why they had to do the assignment or activity in the first place. I learned real quickly that before I could do anything to help them develop their academic literacies, I had to g...
Comments