Being a teacher, particularly an English teacher, means waging a constant battle against the chaos always threatening to unleash itself in your classroom at a moment’s notice. It seems like every year, we’re trying some new strategy or tool to keep things under control, to varying effects.
Most students (let’s be real, most humans) tend to exert the minimum level of effort needed to complete a task. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we don’t have the time, energy, or resources to go above and beyond on every. single. task. This can become frustrating in our classrooms, however, when students turn in poor quality work on what we thought was a good assignment or earn low scores on a quiz we thought they were well-prepared for.
There are many types of requests for these that cross our desks, but perhaps none so daunting as the letter of recommendation for university admission.
Talk about fortuitous timing. Right around the same time we sat down to compose this post, California made headlines for…
The essay was only three paragraphs, not even filling the front of a piece of paper. Already a bad sign….
When we reflected on our first year after leaving the classroom, Kate shared that she wished she’d treated parent and…