Blog

Teaching, Learning, and Writing in Northern Michigan

This I Believe

This week's post is a little different for me. We did "This I Believe" essays in Junior English classes, so I thought I would share mine. I wrote my essay first and then turned it into a digital story. Here is the video version of this week's post....

Be a Teacher

(This was a piece that I wrote during the Chippewa River Writing Project summer institute.) _________________________________________ Molly finished ringing up my order and placed my produce into a bag. “That’ll be $16.34,” she said, and then barely taking a breath,...

How Explain Everything Has Improved My Feedback

In the fall, I saw this video from Jim Burke about using the voice memo app on an iPhone to provide audio feedback to students during the writing process.  It’s not exaggeration to say that the technique Jim explained changed my entire paradigm about feedback and...

To Go or to Grow?

Every teacher must at some point question staying with the profession.  My moment came last fall.  Oddly, this was not a case of my asking whether I still enjoyed the job; I do without a doubt.  Recent changes, though, in my state and across the nation have made it...

Lessons

Did you ever have one of those epiphanies where you feel like everything in the universe is pointing you in one direction? This year has been that for me.  And who am I to ignore the universe when it is hollering at me? In the fall I joined twitter after a presenter...

First Post!

Finally!  This is School in a Small Town World!  And the views here are my own. Though I have had many websites over the years, I am now joining the blogosphere.  I've always used writing as a means of figuring things out: in my teaching, in my life, and in my...

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