Category: Uncategorized
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Where My Grammar and Language Lessons Begin: Tools for Emphasis
In my last post I discussed the first of five lessons I’m sharing this spring from my new book Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students (due out this summer). The concept I shared, while simple, has been powerful in my classes: I’ve found students learn language lessons (encompassing grammar,…
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Five Lessons I Learned While Writing a Book on Grammar, Language, Mechanics, and Writing Instruction: Part 1
Happy Belated New Year! I’m delighted to announce that I’m properly back to the newsletter, and for those wondering where I’ve been, I spent the fall and early winter finishing up my now-completed manuscript for my third book: Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students (due out in July). I…
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Smile Before Winter Break (and Thanksgiving and Halloween)
As a young teacher I was advised by multiple veteran teachers not to smile before Winter Break. The notion was that because I was new (and in my case looked fifteen), I needed to show that I meant business. That my class was business. This advice was nearly universal for new teachers when I came…
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My ChatGPT and Generative AI Policy This Year
Like many teachers, I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about how I would handle AI in my classes. That journey was often an all-seasons-in-a-day experience. I would go from excitement over its possibilities to existential fear concerning AI’s potential implications to concerns about whether allowing students to farm out planning or proofreading…
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A New Year and a New Approach
Today’s post marks the beginning of the seventh year of my Rewrite Newsletter, and over the last couple weeks I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on why I started it in the first place. While I have always been a writer, for much of the first five years of my teaching career, I took a…
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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,…
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Another 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…
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It’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…
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Pausing 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…
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Having 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…
Matthew M. Johnson 