Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
After more than two decades of teaching middle school, my answer has simplified over time. Twenty years ago, I would have said that you need to keep students busy, change up activities multiple times a period, make sure they’re doing something. Ten years ago, I would have said that you need to see the infinite potential of middle schoolers… Continue reading
I first saw Kendra Atleework’s memoir Miracle Country in the Lone Pine visitor center, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, below Mount Whitney along Highway 395. The building rose out of the desert to meet us on our seventh summer trip to Mammoth Lakes in ten years. Each year, I had considered… Continue reading
Over winter break, I walked with a childhood friend through a local botanical garden and I found myself briefly ranting about my job. All the COVID changes and restrictions are enough to make you want to leave education, I said. To be clear, I’m not leaving… Continue reading
What I realized during remote teaching and then back in the classroom is how powerful Google Docs can be for a specific purpose: I can “drop into” a group’s work during class and help make their writing and research better than it would have been otherwise. In a recent resilient history podcast project… Continue reading
Craig Taylor’s New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time landed in my library stack when the world was starting to open up again, early spring 2021. At the time I wasn’t sure when I would be visiting the city again. But reading this book felt like walking the streets… Continue reading
Teaching remotely last year showed me how much more I could learn about my students. Here are three very human practices I want to continue in real life… Continue reading
In Raising a Rare Girl: A Memoir, Heather Lanier is so honest and beautiful on the page that writing a review feels like the palest shadow of the book. Describing her daughter Fiona, born with severe developmental delays and diagnosed with the unusual Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, Lanier asks us to envision a different way of looking at people with disabilities… Continue reading
Lately, the world has been opening up here in our corner of Los Angeles, and I’ve been crying, a lot. Tears have arrived at strange times, in public and private, and more than they did for the entire pandemic year before that. It has taken me a while to figure out why…. Continue reading
With judicious use of fascinating primary sources, history for middle schoolers can burst off the page.
We as teachers can synthesize or “layer” primary sources to to make the sum richer than its part, remember how hard it can be for students to grapple with unfamiliar documents… Continue reading
These days I find myself drawn to story after story about immigration policy, wondering about the faces behind the statistics. Yet Jenny Torres Sanchez’s We Are Not From Here sat on my shelf for longer than I wanted…. Continue reading
Sarah Cooper 