Reading and Critiquing Trauma Memoirs
“Her words and experiences triggered me over and over again. I wasn’t ready to face my own demons. How could I possibly read and critique a memoir about hers?”
Tagged Classroom Challenges
The B+ Student: On Balance, Brevity, and Powder Days
Everybody thinks teachers want all their students to get As. And, of course, we are happy when they do. But as a human being who is also a teacher, you can’t help but hope for more for your students.
The Robe: Giving a Struggling Young Writer Permission to Write What He Knows
By Maryann Gremillion William is nine years old, has Asperger’s, and doesn’t like to write. I don’t know much more than this about him as I arrive at his house, wondering if there’s anything I know that’s going to help this child. When the front door opens he says hello quietly, peering at me from…
Writing Through Trauma: Writing in the Wake of September 11
by Matthew Sharpe Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, I wanted to do something with my two Columbia University creative writing classes that addressed the disaster we had all just experienced. Each of the lessons I planned for my first class went awry. I began by asking my students to free write for five…
In Defense of Teaching Difficult Poems
By Erika Luckert I was developing a lesson for a 6th-grade unit on poetry and mythology. We would read two different Medusa poems, I decided, and then students would have a chance to write their own poems addressed to Medusa. The first poem I selected was Sylvia Plath’s “Medusa,” The second, by Lynn Schmeidler, was…
Exploring Disability Justice through Writing
By Jennifer Bartlett In this lesson from T&W teaching artist Jennifer Bartlett, participants unpack their perceptions of disability, explore the origin of those perceptions, analyze a poem written by a disabled poet, explore explicit and implicit biases within a dialogical framework, and write a poem exploring an aspect of their own identity. Grade/Population: High school or adults…
Five Tips on Co-Teaching
By Olaya Barr and India Gonzalez The two of us have been co-teaching sixth-graders at PS 122, Mamie Fay in Queens, for the past six months. During this time we have learned a great deal about ourselves as individual teachers and as a pair. Because of this, we thought it would be beneficial to present…
Writing Isn’t Over . . . Till We Share
By Daniel Rose We have finished writing the most recent drafts of our personal narratives, the first major writing assignment of the middle school year, our first attempt to show the world how powerful our writing can be, our first courageous leap onto the Velcro wall, where our work will stick and hang for everyone…
Turning Up the Quiet: A First Step for Teaching Urban Kids to Write
By Tammy Smith I wore my yoga top under my shirt the first day of school. A ninth-grade English teacher in Chattanooga’s newest charter school, I had spent half of August studying with Jeffrey Davis, founder of Yoga as Muse, a system of yogic tools that awaken creativity and sustain life as a writer. I…
Prompts for Figurative Writing
By Laura Campbell-Lui I am a reading specialist with the New York City Department of Education. My students are designated as at risk before they are assigned to me. The students I work with the most have issues such as limited phonemic awareness and/or phonics acquisition, limited vocabularies, learning disabilities, or visual impairments. Some are…