Category: Uncategorized
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Zen and the Art of Paper Grading
Last Wednesday I woke to a soft quilt of fluffy snow outside my window. It looked like about three inches, which would not be enough to cancel a school in Michigan but would be enough to turn my normally five minute commute into a fifty minute one. The reason for this is one light on…
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The Writing Teacher’s Secret Weapon: Listening
I come from a long line of talkers. One should only embark on a conversation with my father if you feel like resting your vocal chords for the next forty-five minutes, my grandfather (and this is true) used to communicate with his out-of-state relatives almost exclusively through sending them 90 minute monologues recorded on cassette…
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Why Your First Assignment of the Semester Should Be a Narrative
An interesting shift has happened over the last couple decades in the world of business. The spreadsheet loving, dollars and cents world of business has fallen head over heels for the decidedly unspreadsheet world of storytelling. This can be best seen in the evolution of advertising. Even during the 1990s, commercials were largely information/tagline dissemination…
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Relationship-Based Writing
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 day-in and day-out dealings with student writing we appreciate enough how incredibly hard it is…
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Creating a Narrative of Progress
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 for spending much of my week off reading and responding, I am not one of…
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How to Teach Creativity
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 the major themes discussed in class? Early in my career, this sort of thing was…
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Chasing a Unicorn Part I: How to cut down grading time without sacrificing quality
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 suddenly appeared in the vernacular of almost everyone (student and adult alike) I know with a…
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The Forgotten ‘R’: Using Reflection to Speed Student Learning
“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 seemingly isolated experiences of the past.” –Learning Through Reflection by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick…
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The Importance of Wonder
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 why you eat anything else to a barren, cold, and fruitless landscape that suddenly seems…
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Sleeping Bear Dunes, Dan Pink, and Cranes: How to Use Student Choice to Improve Instruction and Assessments
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 the classroom setting. Even though we do a trip like this every year, I always…
Matthew M. Johnson 