Quotes, Notes, and Genius! Somewhere along the line in my teaching career (lo these near twenty years) I picked up a trick called “Quotes, Notes, and Thoughts.” Sometimes it’s called “Quotes, Notes, and Queries” or “Quotes, Notes, and Comments,” but it’s always the same idea: Students divide their paper into three columns—use their spiral notebooks…
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Teacher Tip Tuesday—9 November 2010
The Power of the Notebook You’ve probably noticed by now that I loathe busy work. I hated it as a kid and I hated it as a teacher. It drove me nuts to see colleagues assigning busy work then complain about how much they had to grade. Now, formative work—the work you need to look…
Teacher Tip Tuesday—1 November 2010
Work it Out When I was teaching high school back in the Aughts, this is what near-daily conversations with my husband used to sound like: him: you need to do something for the stress. me: like quit? him: no, like work out. me (stressed): and when do you think I should do that? While I…
Teacher Tip Tuesday — 26 Oct 2010
By Any Means Necessary It gets better. If you’re a new teacher, right about now—October—is when you should be asking yourself, “Dear God, what kind of hideous mistake have I made?” It’s okay. Really. It gets better. I distinctly remember the beginning of my third year realizing I’d made it to November without a crying…
Teacher Tip Tuesday — 18 Oct 2010
The Importance of Being in Error So much of our teaching life is focused on getting students to get the right answers that it’s all to easy to ignore the importance of mistakes. One thing that was rarely—if ever—stressed in my teacher training was self-reflection. How’d the lesson go today? What went right? What went…