Mimi's Teacher Blog

Talk. It's so important.  When we don't talk about a new piece of knowledge, we don't really take ownership of it. We don't really learn it.  Today the vocab word was pity . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about pity in the first segment of her TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story." She says:  I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his vill...

"Why do you give us a seating chart?" asked A, a ninth grade student yesterday.  I told him it was to try to balance skills within a group. "You're very good at speaking, for example." I showed him his position in the new seating chart.  "I'm hoping that your confidence in speaking will encourage these two people at your table to speak up more. And these two people at your table are really good at writing. They will be good models for you in writing practice." (He has told me he wants to work on writing.) I like to tell students a day in advance, "You will have new seats tomorrow". I want to limit the number of curve balls I throw at students. Sometimes I want to surprise them with content, or an activity, but with classroom logistics, I want there to be few wild cards.  So, how do students get comfortable with a new seat mate?  Today we tried language maps. We did a whole class example with S. I had asked him during an independent vocab ...

Today, for the first time this year, the focus was test prep. The kiddos will take the ACCESS test at the end of this month and it will determine their English class for next year.  To get them familiar with the test question format, I wanted them to create their own test questions. But ah, test prep is notoriously lifeless. How could I imbue it with some of the energy that surrounds their work and writing in the best of times?  Before the break we published our debut issue of The Public , a publication of student writing. Today I wanted kids to interact with the physical magazine and see each others' work in print.  They used white boards to give positive feedback to the writer whose piece they read. In pairs, they read a particular assigned story aloud. Then we looked at the ACCESS practice test question (boring) to understand the layout of the screen. They then had to create a test question and possible answers from the student writing they did.  My big takeaway f...