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…
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…
The Noive!
Jenna Hatfield over at BlogHer has a comprehensive post on a horrifyingly embarrassing moment in Judith Griggs’ life. Lift a Blogger’s Post? But Honestly, Cook’s Source, You Can’t Do That (if the link is kaput, go here: http://www.blogher.com/honestly-cooks-source-you-cant-do). There is the part of me that is sympathetic to effing up super badly—and in writing too—and…
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…
Writing Wednesday 27 Oct 2010
Want to write but stuck for ideas? Use Twitter. Seriously. If you use a program like TweetDeck (nayy) you can easily track trends like #writingprompts or #writingtips or #amwriting. Inkygirl calls them “slow chats” which is a nice term as, if you have TweetDeck (or TweetGrid or TweetChat or HootSuite) compiling all of these hashtagged tweets,…