In one of my first posts of this blog I talked about a subject that I think doesn’t get nearly enough attention: writing is really hard. We all know that it is hard, but I’m not sure that during our… Continue reading

Since the new year I have spent a lot of time doing two things: responding to a massive stack of student essays and slowly working through Thomas Newkirk’s Embarrassment: And the Emotional Underlife of Learning. While some might pity me… Continue reading

Have you ever graded a stack of papers that felt like a record stuck on the same verse? The kind of stack where each paper looks strikingly similar to the one before and after it and nearly all of them parrot… Continue reading

If I was a member of the American Dialect Society, my vote for Word of the Year would be the word unicorn. The word, long monopolized by the six and under, My Little Pony set, has undergone a renaissance and… Continue reading

“Most classrooms are oriented more to the present and the future than to the past. Such an orientation means that students (and teachers) find it easier to discard what has happened and to move on without taking stock of the… Continue reading

We in Michigan are right at the point in November where the fall takes a sharp turn from crisp mornings, beautiful red and yellow trees stretching as far as the eye can see, and apples so sweet that you question… Continue reading

I spent last weekend camping with my advisory at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, and while Northern Michigan painted with fall colors left an impact on me (see above), what struck me even more was seeing my students outside of… Continue reading

It is the heart of college application season in my school, which means one thing: college essay after college essay after college essay walking through my door. It would not be hyperbolic to say that I have looked at well… Continue reading

“In too many classrooms, we assign and assess writing without teaching the craft of it.” –Penny Kittle The first time I heard about parallel structure, limiting one’s use of linking verbs, and different sentence types, I was only a couple… Continue reading

This is the third in my series of posts leading up to my NCTE Ignite Talk on how to be as effective and efficient as possible with feedback to student writing. If you want to read the first post on… Continue reading