I’m a high school English teacher with the unusual twist of having started my professional life as a programmer in Silicon Valley. Once I started teaching I felt the *immense* pain of grading essays. So I put my programming experience to work to build a tool to help me grade more efficiently. There’s so much repetition and manual labor involved in grading essays (e.g. writing the same dang comment over and over again!). It’s just screaming for a little tech help.

The end result is http://www.EssayTagger.com

Teachers raved about us at our debut at NCTE. My former prof, Gerald Graff, is a big believer in us. I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think. There’s a video on the homepage that explains how it all works. The first 30 seconds are all it really takes for the a-ha moment to kick in.

We’re a tiny, TINY startup and we’re dying to get teachers out there to discover us and talk about us. Take a look if you have the time and let me know what you think!

thanks!

I would love to read more about your collaboration with Heather on your American Lit course this year. (Before becoming our school librarian, I had taught American Literature for 8 years at our high school.)

My biggest issue was getting the students on board and informing the parents of what was happening. I introduced the idea to parents at Back-to-School Night, and I still feel that wasn’t enough. I had two parent conferences over the course of 9 weeks, and wrote explanatory emails to parents at least a few times a week. Until everyone (administrators, parents, students, and teachers) understands more about project-based learning, inquiry, and formative assessment, there will always be those barriers, and teachers who try these things will be considered “risk takers.”

I can say that this worked in Meg’s class, and it worked in mine. There were certainly drawbacks, and there were certainly some students who did not benefit in the end, but that’s what we’ll work on for next year’s classes. For now, I’m not giving up hope.

Best of luck to you in your new school!

I spent 1 entire school year teaching Geometry at a higher level of instruction and expectation. Toward the end of the 5th sixth week I finally started seeing some positive results when a group of kids figured out the concept of volume v. area v. linear constants of change.

What did I get out of it – Fired. (I’m sorry, but we need to be more conventional in our teaching.)

Not all bad, I’ve since found a school that isn’t mired in the 19th century.

Great stories of classroom visits here and stories that need to be heard by a larger audience for sure. The state of mind of how education “should” work needs to evolve into something more organic, fruitful, personal, and meaningful. That will never happen with students sitting in rows of desks for 7 hours a day. Change will come, slowly, but it will come.

I really like your idea of providing thematic lists as a framework, and also of allowing for students to add selections of their own, especially if they can provide rationale for its inclusion.

Even if we stick to more narrowly defined reading lists, we can open things up in terms of what we and the students do with the books. In my Honors Imaginative Process course, “Jekyll and Hyde” is a text that’s been in the curriculum for the past 10 years. It’s a good fit, given its relationship to the archetypal framework of the course, and it’s a decent read. I want to keep it in the course, but this year, I decided to solicit ideas from the students as to what type of experience they’d like to have with the novel. I’ve set up a forum on the moodle asking them to submit ideas. The only requirements are that the activities be
a:) fun and engaging
b:) something that will encourage an active reading of the novel.

I just posted it today, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with…