One More Favorite Language Lesson: Repetition and Style
The most important change I have ever made to my grammar and language lessons was one that I originally shared on here a few years ago: Reorganizing grammar and language lessons by what they do, not by what they are. For example, instead of breaking grammar and language into traditional categories like parts of speech, punctuation, and rhetoric, we now talk about the tools we have to capture the cadence of our voices, add emphasis, or—for this week’s favorite language lesson—add some style to our writing. And for adding style, nothing I know beats repetition. In fact, when one boils…
Continue ReadingIntroducing Camp Rewrite: A Summer Learning Opportunity Unlike Any Other
Since the fall of 2021, I have wanted to create a professional learning experience that explores what we’ve learned since the start of the pandemic while also countering the negativity, isolation, and bone-deep tiredness that have too often characterized the experience of educators in this young decade. Something that reimagines what education could be even as it grapples with the brave new world of the present. Something grounded in community to help make up for the communal spaces we’ve lost over the last three years. Something optimistic yet real, ambitious yet restorative, deep yet full of practical ready-for-the-classroom materials. It…
Continue ReadingAnother Favorite Language Lesson: Parallel Structure
This is the second entry in a series I’m doing on some favorite spring grammar/language lessons. Here is a link to the first one. My grammar and language lessons as a new teacher generally didn’t go well. I would be up at the board diagramming a sentence or coaxing the difference between an adjective or adverb out of a room of very quiet seventh graders, and suddenly I would be hit by a realization that even I was bored. There was one notable exception though: parallel structure. In my first year, I did a lesson on how writers use parallel…
Continue ReadingA Favorite Language Lesson: How to Breath More Life (and Meaning) Into Commas
As I mentioned last week, I am in the midst of finishing a manuscript about ways to make grammar and language instruction more interesting, valuable, joyful, inclusive, and generally more effective. As I dot the final i’s and cross the final t’s, I won’t have a ton of extra bandwidth to spend on the newsletter, but in some ways that is alright, as April is generally not a time for deep pedagogical reflection for most teachers I know. Instead it is often testing season for my secondary readers and the end of the year for my college ones. With this…
Continue ReadingIt’s Testing Season: Here are Some Best Practices for Providing Better Language Instruction
In two weeks my Michigan students will be taking the SAT or PSAT as a part of their state testing. Wherever your school is, I would wager that, if it is a k-12 school, you likely have a test on the horizon as well. Further, I would wager again that whatever your test is, a meaningful chunk on the ELA side will involve grammar and language usage. The prevalence of such tests in the spring and the prevalence of grammar and language on such tests generally means that in schools across the country, late March and early April tend to…
Continue ReadingPausing for Poetry with Brett Vogelsinger
I have talked before about how Brett Vogelsinger’s work with finding ways to bring more poetry in the language arts classroom and use poetry beyond the classic poetry explications or once-or-twice-a-year freewrites has been transformational to my practice. This last week, Vogelsinger’s long-anticipated (at least for me) book Poetry Pauses was released, and I am delighted to report that it lived up to every one of my expectations. It is one of the freshest, most engaging, and most practical pedagogical reads I’ve encountered in some time, and I can’t recommend it enough. After reading it, I knew I wanted to…
Continue ReadingHaving Your Cake and Time to Eat It Too: Five Places We Can Save a Lot of Time and Provide Better Instruction by Letting Students Lead
Writing teachers have never had it easy. Pick any era and dig into its literature around writing instruction and it won’t take long before you find those who teach composition bemoaning how Herculean their task is. My favorite historical example (which I also begin Flash Feedback with) was when Dr. Edwin M. Hopkins asked the following question on the first page of the inaugural edition of The English Journal: Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done Under Present Conditions? And his answer? No. Dr. Hopkins goes on to say that “it is an indisputable truth” that composition cannot be taught well…
Continue ReadingBuilding a Sequoia Root System
The largest tree in the world is the sequoia redwood, coming in at upwards of 2,600,000 pounds and heights taller than a football field. It follows that a tree that big must have an enormous root system to stay upright, especially in the face of the earthquakes, forest fires, and atmospheric rivers of California, right? Well, not exactly. I learned in the new book Just Teaching: Feedback, Engagement, and Well-Being for Each Student by Jonathan Eckert that the root system for sequoia redwood is only 6-12 feet deep–a quarter of the depth of the Black Walnut growing in my backyard.…
Continue ReadingHow I Introduced My Class to ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the bot that launched a thousand thought pieces (here is a primer on it, if you somehow haven’t encountered it). The takes I’ve seen have ranged from declarations that it will bring about the death of the college essay and high school English to it being an indispensable tool for realtors or those looking for a raise to prognostications about it shaking white collar work and democracy itself to their foundations. I, too, have guesses, hopes, and fears about ChatGPT and the recent rise of AI, but given the firehose of here-is-what-I-think-ChatGPT-will-do pieces at this moment, I’m not…
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Matthew M. Johnson 