Teach Wonder

As an English teacher, it is my ultimate goal to send my students out into the world with adequate reading and writing skills. That goal rises above all others. However, I also feel my purpose is greater than that. When I teach the Diary of Anne Frank, for example, I don't just teach comprehension and fluency as students read the play. I don't just teach effective expression as they write their essays. I don't teach just symbolism and other literary elements. I teach compassion along with comprehension. I teach empathy along with expression. I teach students that prejudice and discrimination have no place in my classroom, nor should they have any place in our school, our community, or our world. Unfortunately, it's been a few years since I've taught eighth-grade English, so it's been a while since I've been able to teach those lessons to a wide group of students within the context of the Holocaust. I would typically show my eighth graders the "Paper Cli...

It's no secret that kids love games. A regular review for a test is yawnsauce with a side of snores, but a "space race" on Socrative? My students (mostly) get pretty excited about it. Competition is a pretty huge motivator!  While competition may not be my cup of tea (ex: I have never been interested in any sort of sportsball, I wish I could direct the One Act Play without entering the contest, and I prefer cooperative board games to competitive ones), there's no doubt that we live in a competitive world. Enter Classcraft. I stumbled upon it recently either on the #edchat hashtag on Twitter or on an educator blog somewhere. I don't quite remember. Regardless of how I found it, I thought I would try it out. Short review: I AM TOTALLY OBSESSED WITH IT.  Long review? Keep reading this post! I love Classcraft firstly because it encourages cooperation. It can be competitive (more on that later), but it has more cooperative elements than competitive ones. I love it, sec...

When I started this blog, I wanted to focus on teaching. I wanted to focus on sharing resources and ideas, what has worked well for me, or new approaches that I wanted to try. I didn't want to write about teaching during a pandemic. I've chosen to write about it now, though, because it seems disingenuous not to. It feels like I'm leaving out part (a pretty significant part) of what teaching today is all about. And so, I want to share a few (hopefully not too controversial) thoughts. Back in August, I posted my concerns about returning to school on Facebook. An acquaintance from my home town, who is a nurse, commented (I'm paraphrasing), "Suck it up, buttercup. If I have to go into work every day, so do you." I understand that she was probably speaking from a place of stress (I can't imagine being a nurse right now), but I also know her, and she has a very brazen personality. I was upset by the comment, but I also didn't see the logic in it. Shouldn...

The last line of my favorite book series: The Lord of the Rings. (The Harry Potter series does steal the "favorite" spot from time to time, but I am overdue for a reread of Lord of the Rings, so my yearning for Middle Earth is a fair bit stronger than my yearning for Hogwarts.) My use of this line is simply to say that I'm back to teaching in a hybrid environment in my classroom. On December 28th, 2020, my son James was born, and so, while my wife was recovering, and while my family was adjusting to a new little in the house, I taught from my home for two weeks. My students were (for the most part) in distance learning for the two weeks following the winter break anyway, so I felt that didn't really need to be in my classroom. On Monday, I came back. Monday was MLK Day, so I didn't have students, so the time was spent preparing myself for the upcoming week. On Tuesday, students came back to a "hybrid" model. I saw my Red group Tuesday-Wednesday, and my B...

I’m teaching from home this week due to close contact with a positive COVID-19 case outside of the school district (a haircut, if you must know). Thankfully, we were both wearing masks at the time (and wearing them correctly--over the nose and mouth), so my test came back negative. I really thought I'd enjoy teaching from home since I enjoyed it last spring, but there are several reasons why I don’t. Last spring, when everyone was at home for two months, I came up with a schedule to do some classes synchronously and some asynchronously during the week. Students always had work to do, but I wasn’t always “lecturing”. However, I was always available to answer questions if needed. With our current hybrid model, I still do that. There are some days that I "lecture" everyone in the room and in the Zoom, and there are some days that students have independent work to do, so I dismiss the Zoomers, and if they have questions, they can chat with me on GoGuardian (where I can also s...

  Good morning, everyone! I decided to publish my "report" (such as it is) representing the Northwest Region of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English. I believe this is my first report, so I ought to introduce myself. My name is Andrew Hanson (he/him). I am an English teacher, theatre director, newspaper advisor, and a webmaster at Win-E-Mac Public Schools in Erskine. I have my Google Educator Level 2 Certification, and I just started classes this past week as I pursue my Masters of Education with a concentration in Instructional Technology. My wife Becky is the school counselor in Fosston (she teaches with Sierra Gilbertson), and together we have an eighteen-month-old bundle-of-energy named Elanor (Ellie). Enough about me. I approached Sierra and Katie in November of last year about filling the empty position of NW Rep. However, at the time, I was just starting rehearsals for the One-Act Play Contest; this was my first time directing this play after taking over from ...