Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

Routine is everything in the classroom. It gives structure to students who may not have much of a structure at home and alleviates anxiety since students know what to expect. Sample Quick Write from 2013 When I first started teaching, I would welcome everyone to the classroom, go over announcements, and then we would complete the Quick Write for the day. I created a nifty little template for students to complete and submit at the end of each week. Typically it would be a prompt that would either review the previous day's lesson or introduce the day's lesson. The Pros: It was a great routine for the students that allowed them reflect, discuss, and engage for the period.  The Cons: The audience consisted of me and maybe a TA so grammar, proof-reading, and full explanations were not a priority for students. The paper was frequently lost, which required students to either start over or receive a zero. As the school year progressed, it felt almost impossible to keep

Last September, I reflected on my goals and feelings about my school year school. With a focus on creating more authentic project-based lessons, my Google Innovator project , and my work towards my Master's degree in Educational Technology , my fourth year of teaching did end up being epic with lots of unexpected surprises.  The biggest surprise of all was one of my friends and department mates was offered an incredible job opportunity, which he took at the semester. With this unexpected change, we gained a new teacher, class schedules were rearranged (I ended up teaching AP Euro for a semester), unofficial mentorships occurred, and somehow a student teacher was added in. All in all, Minarets and the social science department made this seemingly negative event a positive.  This is why my last blog post was in February. I wanted to stay online and be as plugged in as possible this school year, but the craziness of the year got the better of me. But I'm back and prepared to

In 2014, I have experimented with student blogging and loved it, minus one thing: how long it took me to grade. For each student, I would have to find their blog (typically collected into a Google Form), find the specific post (hopefully I didn't far behind in grading), read it and then find them in the grading system to enter the grade. This became twice as time consuming when I had students commenting on each other's blog as assignments. I tried having students copying and pasting their comments into a spreadsheet so I could keep better track, but many students forgot, pretended that they wrote a comment, or messed with each other's responses since it was an all access spreadsheet. I even tried doing everything in a spreadsheet where each student had a custom tab, but this was difficult to manage with seven classes and I wanted students to actually be publishing on a blog. After about three years, I feel like I have finally perfect system for myself: I have students p