The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

As the school year settles into full swing and I find myself more and more immersed in the planning, creating, assessing, and reevaluating of the daily flow of my lessons, I start to feel the pressure of feedback building up on me. I know that the value of learning in my gradeless classroom is much higher than it used to be. I believe that the feedback I give my students is making them into more successful ELA students. But there are so many days I look at the towering pile of work that requires feedback, and I just feel completely inadequate. There are not enough hours, not enough patience, not enough me to go around for all of them. Some days it feels like it would just be so much easier to give a ten-question multiple choice test, run it on the Scantron or through Schoolnet, and call it good. I think these things in my moments of weakness, but I know that I could never be satisfied with that type of assessment for the deep learning I want to happen in my classroom. I know that stu

It started yesterday at the lunch table. The "progress report talk." When will we send them? How long will they get to bring them back? How many assignments are on yours? How many tests have you given? Who is failing? I got a sick feeling in my stomach, kinda like I used to feel in middle school when progress reports were about to come out. When discussions like these happen, I always feel like the odd man out. It always makes me pause, just for a second, and wonder Is the way I'm doing it really best? Shouldn't I have given a test by now? Surely there's some kid that I should be failing...if they're all doing well doesn't that mean I'm just a slacker, the "easy" teacher? Old habits sure do die hard. It's so easy to get caught up in the assignment trap, especially when the kids are stuck in the finished=grade=done mindset and you can't figure out a great way to communicate progress to parents without putting a number on anything. I&

My 2017 New Year's resolution was to learn a new skill. I take pride in calling myself a life-long learner, but it occurred to me that most of the ways I was still learning were based in reading, writing, and teaching: three things that come very easily and naturally to me, partly through aptitude, but mainly due to many years of practice. It took me a while to decide what I would do, but in February I settled on taking art classes. My son was already taking at our local arts center so it wouldn't be a major disruption in our schedule, and I love art even though I wouldn't call myself an artist. So on the first Tuesday of February 2017, I sat down in the classroom with my brand-new sketchbook and pencils, and set myself up to learn how to do something new. I expected to learn a lot about technique and skill, but I was unprepared for how much I would learn about teaching from watching my art teacher, Miss Martha, in action. From day one, I began to realize how magical the

I spent this summer completely redoing my classroom. I figured in the past two years I have completely revamped my curriculum and my grading process, so the only thing left to redo is the physical environment. Go big or go home, right? On my final course surveys, several students commented that I needed to work on changing the physical environment to match the "feel" my classroom had. I knew if several students mentioned it, it was important enough to change. But this post isn't really about that. TL; DR: I redecorated my classroom, and now it looks like this: It is so important to me to establish a classroom culture that will be supportive, nurturing, affirming, and safe for all of my students, so I left school on Friday afternoon in a quandary about how to best establish expectations on the first day. For many years, I was a "go over rules and procedures on the first day" teacher (sometimes on the second and third days too). Two years ago, it was all a

This is the third post in a series about The Gradeless Classroom. You can read the first post here  and the second post here .  It seems like most of the teachers in the gradeless community (myself included) are filled with an almost evangelical zeal when we start talking about these changes in our classrooms. Going gradeless energized my career at its midpoint in a way few other changes have. And sometimes, evangelists forget to tell all sides of the story. So this post is meant to address that other side; the side we don't talk about as much. The parts that are hard, and the problems that might beset you if you decide this path is for you. Pitfalls My decision to go gradeless was rooted in procrastination. Yes, that's right, procrastination. I hated grading papers with such a passion. I would do absolutely anything to avoid it. And it was in the wake of grading 110+ essays about theme in  To Kill a Mockingbird  that my gradeless classroom began to materialize. I knew t

This is the 2nd post in a series about The Gradeless Classroom. Read the first one here . The months following that fateful conversation in my principal's office found me disillusioned with numbers, data, and all of the limitations that come with attempting to neatly place clear boundary lines ("standards") around learning that is messy, noisy, frustrating, and entirely human. The more I pondered, the less I believed that anything at all about the way we do school makes sense. Grouping students by age, norms-based referencing, bell curves, and standardized testing are all leftovers from the factory-reflective system of learning that has been in place since the inception of public schooling. Unfortunately, I have little control over these issues. The one area over which I do have control is my classroom, and I am lucky to be in a school where I am still (mostly) allowed to make my own instructional decisions. I decided it was time to begin making changes. After coming

This morning I went to my usual hiking spot. It was the first time I’d been since May. The end of the school year is always crazy busy, and most days I am just too tired to go hike at the end of the day. Then the school year ended, and I got this lingering allergy/ sinus/ upper respiratory thing that just decimated my stamina. In short, when I arrived this morning I felt much like I was starting from scratch. I went my usual route, headed for my usual trail, the Vertical Mile (you can read about it here ). When I got there, I looked up at it, and I just gave up. I turned around and headed back. I knew I couldn’t do it today. Probably not what you were expecting, huh? After all, this is a post about goals, and I pretty much just gave up on mine. So why even write about it? As teachers, we tend to focus on goal-setting for moving forward. We want to celebrate when we meet goals, or our students meet goals, and we tend to get really down when we don’t meet them. But here’s the th

In 2015, I had been teaching for 14 years. I was pretty comfortable with most aspects of my job. Good classroom management, engaging lessons, happy students for the most part, few parent complaints... in short, I thought everything was great. I was reading professional literature and implementing a few tweaks to my classroom practice here and there, but I was mostly set in my ways. I was experimenting with standards-based grading, but I hadn't really made any radical departure from traditional grading. I changed the name of my assessment process and changed "assignments" in my gradebook to "standards," but the procedures I had always followed in grading remained unchanged. I was comfortable. Flash forward to 3:05, Friday afternoon, 2nd week of school, 2016. I checked my email and saw a message from my principal with the subject line Nothing bad...  and the body text but see me before you leave today.  It's been my experience that the line nothing bad

Days 6-7 of this 30 day poetry challenge have run together for me. I started writing this piece yesterday, inspired by the moment in the morning when I arrive at school and enter the classroom, but it wasn't until today's prompt of writing about a superpower lit the spark of inspiration that this piece really came together. It's not really about a superhero, or even a superpower, just a woefully underfunded teacher facing a powerful foe. Once More Into the Breach So it begins, daily. Early morning light slanting across the ground illuminates yesterday's shrapnel, the detritus of our daily struggle. Across camp, weary officers stand on line at the canteen, armed with copies, checklists, and coffee. Back on the field, I inspect my armory and munitions. My weapons aren't the newest. Most of them, I bought myself. The Department insists we should "eliminate waste," fight more conservatively, ration our meager supplies. I don't think t

Today's prompt was to write a poem inspired by something you've learned. It is 9:25 pm, and I am just now sitting down for the first moment of free time I've found today, if you don't count the 5 minutes during 2nd period that I sat down to read over a few poems in search of a theme collection. It's been a busy day, and my brain isn't wanting to settle to write. I've learned that foggy brain becomes a more frequent occurrence during the spring. I spent quite a bit of time today reflecting on the experience my kids have had with inquiry circles. It was clear from their responses on the K-W-L chart we completed in class today that they are frustrated with my vague instructions. Learning for learning's sake doesn't have a stopping point. It's not something you can do the minimum on, and spend the rest of the time fiddling around on Youtube or playing a game. I've learned that students don't understand the point of learning if it

I didn't get a chance to post my poem for yesterday. I was too busy watching the Tarheels win the NCAA Championship! Sorry, I digress. So I am posting both of my poems for Days 3-4 now. Day 3's prompt was a string of words that had to be strung together to form a poem. I chose set #8: rise, stage, cries, thunder, stone, path, purple. Untitled At the end of each day, as the sun draws the purple curtains of night across the stage of the sky, I rise. Bird cries fade into silence  as my feet pound the thunder of my passing. Breathe in, breathe out. The path unspools before me and  behind me, my footsteps unremarked by sleeping stones.    Day 4's prompt was haiku. I am so bad at writing haiku. It's not a form that I have ever found to be a good fit for my thought process. As such, my offering for today is just not very good, but at least I have one, and I rather like that it came out very open to interpretation. Self-Esteem Naked

Today's prompt was to make a list. I tried several different ones, but couldn't get my favorite shoes out of my head. (I know, right...what's that about?) So I started making lists about my shoes, and here's what I ended up with. 6 Meditations on My Favorite Shoes  You were the most expensive shoes I've ever bought. I paid $150 for you; a steal because you were an end-of-season markdown from $300, but still an uncomfortable amount for this bargain shopper. You were worth every penny. I found you slouching quietly in the top corner of the  clearance rack--misplaced-- and in the wrong size section. You were a 9 in a forest of 13's. I felt an immediate kinship. Your buttery suede only gets better with age: at the beginning of every fall, I pull you down  from the shelves and stroke your furry brown skin as though I'm touching you for the first time all over again. You make every outfit look pulled together. You dre

My Facebook friend Sarah Donovan is running a poetry challenge on her blog over at  Ethical ELA . I was pretty inspired by the idea, and I had been playing with the idea of doing a poetry challenge for April, so I will be spending the next 30 (ish) days posting a poem each day. Hopefully most will be original creations, but I may share some favorites as well. I even bought a great new composition book to host my scribbled sloppy copies (yay for new office supplies). Such a pretty cover... I ❤ composition books So without further ado... Here's Day One. The Best Part of Me My husband Calls me stubborn. I prefer tenacious. I get it honest. My great-grandparents built the beginnings of a farm in 1902 for seven hundred dollars. It was an astronomical expense. "You'll never pay it off," people said. "You're going to fail." In 2012  we celebrated the 110-year anniversary of their "failure": Mountain View Farm,