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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Angela Lankford It’s no secret that many college graduates lack competence as writers. Too often students enter the university with poor writing skills and leave four years later having made little or no progress at improving them. Debates about how we can best change this run the gamut. Some say we should return to…
by Alex Cuff “White cops are racist,” a student said. It was September 2014, and we were discussing Ferguson in my third-period, tenth-grade ELA class. “I hate white people,” another student asserted, holding my gaze. A hush came over my class of 28 students as they studied my face, gauging how I, a white teacher…