Secondary teachers, are Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales required readings for 12th grade English in your school? Do they HAVE to be taught or can you supplement those texts with other stories?
My new school is newly mandating all ElA teachers to teach each ell lesson in one single period. No one is willing to break down the timing for teachers much less demo this shit for us. What the actual fuck are we even doing anymore??? All advice needed. Admin & coaches alike rnt helping.
Hello all. I'm a HS teacher and I've been told that most of my students were taught reading using the whole-language/balanced literacy approach. It would certainly explain some of the things I've seen. Does anyone know if there have been any longitudinal studies on the impact of this approach (vs phonics, etc) on high school and college success, reading success, etc? I would welcome links to scholarship on the topic.
I’m not a new teacher, per se, but this year I am focusing on teaching how to figure out the meaning of words using context and connotation. This standard seems to be pushed aside for the “essential” ones in my district. I teach 5th grade, for reference.
I know to teach them to use context clues, look for synonyms and antonyms, look for the definition. But what I do not know is if there are any concrete strategies for this, other than lots of modeling and direct instruction.
Does anyone have a different way to approach this standard? I would love to get ideas so I can see growth in my students.
What are some of the required readings you have read or taught as students or english teachers in high school? Give your state and the list. I’m in Alabama and I went to school from 2021-2025 and here is what we read in a predominantly black school.
9th Grade English
- Where I fell in love with literature! To kill a mockingbird was my all time favorite. I am soon going to start re reading The Odyssey now as an english major, Emily Wilson’s translation so we will see how it goes!
• The Scarlet Ibis
• The Odyssey
• Fahrenheit 451
• The Bluest Eye
• To Kill A Mockingbird
10th Grade English (Honors)
- We NEVER read the books in class, so many of us didn’t read the books at home😂, and she never quizzed us on if we did or not, this class for some reason was a strict focus on A.C.T prep. Despite this, i did read one (warriors don’t cry) that felt more natural to read than the rest.
• Julius Caesar
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
•The Scarlet Letter
•Warriors don’t cry
11th Grade English
- According to her, we were also suppose to read The Crucible but she was REQUIRED to teach us A.C.T prep alongside her curriculum which took majority of our reading time. She taught us the English and Writing Sections. Although we only got to read one book, she was truly amazing at what she did and one of the best teachers I ever had. Truly an amazing woman. Shout out to Ms.Kashara Davis!
•The Story of An Hour
• Richard Cory
•Ain’t I A Woman
•The Great Gatsby
12th Grade English
-Very boring class, nothing stood out to me and it wasn’t the literature’s fault. 😉
•Beowulf
•Wife of Bath
•Hamlet
•Pride and Prejudice
CONCLUSION: It’s not the amount of books you read, it’s the teacher that helps you stimulate a love for literature.
Who is going to Philly? Idk if it's too late to go.
Hello all, I teach 9th and 10th honors ELA in one of the communities affected by Isaias. We have had school off since last Thursday, and probably won’t be back until Wednesday. I am trying to think of any stories, poems, or articles I could do related to weathering the storm (figurative or literal) / community togetherness that could ring true to them but not feel like rubbing salt on any wounds. A lot of the damage has been structural, but many still are without power and cell service. Any ideas of what I could do?
Hi I really want these two books urgently,
Hmh team still did not provide us with resources(accounts not ready for teachers),
the principal is still calling them and it seems like they are super busy
I can provide you with the teacher's timetable as a proof
I am at a new high school for first time in ten years. I have a good bit of freedom but I’m adjusting to new school culture and this means I need help finding some novels and plays for my class.
Most of my team picks old white guy canon because they believe that counts as holding high expectations. I am fine with one of their novels units of using F451. However, I want to replace LOTF. I didn’t read it in school but read it over summer and absolutely hated it. I can’t see my students having any engagement with it.
I am trying to find something without too much inappropriate stuff because parents here are involved. I would love a more diverse author to balance the curriculum. I would also love less of a young adult book so that I don’t rub too many people the wrong way with moving away from canon if that makes sense?
I started reading Almond by Sohn Won-pyung. It’s a good coming of age but spent too much with the porno mags and one of the characters cusses every sentence.
any ideas? The only novel I have thought of is Station Eleven
I need a film suggestion for an 8th grade ELA classroom.
Long story short, too late: We are just finishing up a unit in narrative writing, culminating in a summative where students write a short story about themselves working a “day in the life” of a future career, showcasing their ability to write and format dialogue, include figurative language, and include sensory details - you know how it goes.
We recently went through budget cuts leaving me with much larger sections than I’ve previously taught, and switched to a new schedule this year leaving me with approximately 5 hours less of time a week to grade during school hours - I accept that I’ll probably have to bring a little home but really don’t have it in me to bring the whole stack home, so I’m looking for a film I can put in for a couple of days while I tackle the bulk of the grading.
Tl;dr: looking for an 8th-grade appropriate movie that has at least tenuous connections to the unit - maybe a teenager suddenly transported into adulthood or groups of teens acting like adults.
Considered and rejected Back to the Future, 13 Going on 30, Freaky Friday, and Big. All fit the basic concept but have language or situations I’m not comfortable showing in a middle school. Thought I’d turn to Reddit for help!
This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post
Hi all! This year, I'm experimenting with a new revisions policy in my classroom. I'm not going to get super in-depth here, but as it pertains to this post, students have to earn 'revision points' in order to have opportunities to revise various kinds of assignments-- I'm calling it 'Inspiration'. Inspiration can be gained from a variety of sources, such as participation in class, enrichment activities, conferences with me, etc. -- in my head, it's a fairly passive system: students gain Inspiration for meaningfully and consistently engaging with ELA. Whenever Inspiration is earned (or, eventually, spent), I update that student's total on a Google Spreadsheet.
I don't want Inspiration to be in short supply, but right now, it is a huge headache to keep track of everything. Remembering to pull up the sheet in the first place and update a student's number is one thing-- I can handle that easily enough -- but there have been a few times this year already where I've decided to give the entire team or an entire class Inspiration for something like a particularly successful Socratic Seminar or Gallery Walk. In order to do that on Google Sheets, I have to go through each individual name on the list and manually increase each number by 1. It has got to be one of the biggest wastes of time I have willingly engaged in in quite a while.
Has anyone ever used a similar system, or are there any spreadsheet wizards around? I would love to be able to simply press a plus or minus button to change each student's total by 1 all at once. If that is not possible, I'll have to start looking at alternatives for keeping track of these numbers, because what I'm doing right now just doesn't feel sustainable as we get further into the school year.
I'm not even talking about kids nowadays who use AI to write their entire essays. I mean simpler, more subtle stuff like built-in suggestions to finish sentences, autocorrect, and kids copying and pasting information from Google summaries. Everybody ends up sounding the same, so I can't really even assess their understanding. I miss grading twenty essays for The Outsiders and seeing all of these weird typos, patterns, and strange circular logic that varied from student to student. They all had these unique, undeveloped styles that hadn't been corrected yet. Now, with everything being spoon-fed to them, all their styles are blurring together. It's a silly reason I'm glad there's been a recent trend of schools going back to pen and paper.
Bonus if it plays with perspective in a unique way. This would be for freshman, so I want it to be something that helps us have a mature conversation around ablism and disability rights.
8th Grade ELA teachers what does your average lesson look like? I’m not talking about your super engaging lessons but rather a typical day. I’m about to start an interim position, and I’m looking for strong daily/weekly routines.