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There I said it. I’m not sorry. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, for the whole ten years I’ve been teaching high school ELA, and I’m ready to say that some books are more important than others. I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with reading to escape, to relax, to be entertained. That’s all great. But in the classroom, we aren’t training students to read so they can escape the real world. We’re teaching them to read to be more present in the world—to be a ful

First of all, the common core division between reading informational texts and reading literary texts has always seemed reductive to me. If we want students to understand how the world of words works and where texts come from, we should be less simplistic when it comes to categories. That said, if you are looking for excellent nonfiction texts to study in high school language arts, these are some of my favorites that have been engaging and important to my students. “This is W

Canva code is an exciting tool that I feel I've barely started to use to its highest potential. Full disclosure, I have run into some setbacks that you will want to watch out for before you dedicated too many hours to a Canva code project. My school's network settings recently started blocking my Canva sites with embedded coded widgets because of the javascript. Fortunately, I've realized it's more effective to embed the activities directly into Canvas. That seems to do the

The first time I taught The Great Gatsby, I didn't do it well. I was a new teacher, and I still thought students would become passionate about a book if I was passionate about the book. I thought they would understand the book if I simply explained it to them. I didn't yet really understand Bloom's Taxonomy or cognitive load. I went on to teach The Great Gatsby every year the next seven years. Fortunately, it's a hard book to hate. The prose are stunning, the themes are still

I grew up watching I Love Lucy. My family and I gathered in my grandmother's family room every Sunday to snuggle under blankets and watch Lucille Ball's classic comedy gold on VHS. I didn't realize until I became an ELD and adult ESL teacher how much I learned about teaching across languages by watching I Love Lucy. Now I show I Love Lucy as English listening practice to my adult ESL learners almost every class. It's perfect because I teach a 3-hour, level-one English class t

Gameshow inspired review games are a staple of secondary education. Students love them. Teachers love them, and technology has made them easier to make and more fun to play than ever. But, especially in a big class, (and I teach in a state with ELA classes capped at 40 students) there is a flaw—the downtime between turns. When teams take turns answering questions, if there are more than two teams, there are several minutes when a team doesn’t have a question to answer. If t

The future kind of sucks. I don’t mean that it won’t be good, or, at least, contain some good. I’m sure it will. I’m sure wonderful things will happen. I hope wonderful things will happen to me, and to my family, and to my students, and to my community. But I’ve realized as I’ve been planning this new semester of high school study skills, that the future really sucks as a motivator. I say this because most of the time, the future we describe to students is a lie, and they kn

Listening is essential to learning a language. Sometimes as ESL teachers, we jump right to analysis questions, and word studies, and making connections, and we forget to just assign listening activities. You can purchase a lesson based on this audio here .

The first thing new ESL teachers ask is, "What do I teach?" Teaching high school ESL or ELD or ESOL (whatever acronym your school...

It's back to school season, and for many teachers, that means spending some time staring at the walls. That's not to say we aren't hard...

Purposeful phonics instruction in high school can be a game changer in for multilingual learners, but it's not easy to find great phonics...

Ricky Reads a Story (from I Love Lucy) Down the Line of Translation (I Love Lucy) Fire Drill (The Office) The Short Red Carpet (Parks and...

Get newcomers practicing listening to and writing fractions in English with this interactive game.

I learned this year that so much of teaching multilingual students in the core subjects is about finding the right word. It's like fly...