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"In the middle of the school year, I always regret my choice of becoming an AP and Honors English teacher. Not because I hate to teach, but because I'm always swimming in essays that I have to grade. In order to accommodate the load, I adapted the elementary way of thinking and formed a writers' workshop for my own classroom. Once they participate in the workshop, students are able to learn how to revise their own essays. Because of this, the time it takes for me to grade essays is literally cut in half. Suggestions for Implementing a Writers' Workshop in Your Classroom"

"When we ask teachers what is their biggest obstacle in teaching writing, they often say "Time!"  Indeed, the time to fit everything in and do a good job with writing workshop is our greatest challenge.  There is no way to remove this obstacle from our daily challenges, so we must, as Rudyard Kipling tells us in his poem "If",  fill the "unforgiving minutes with sixty second worth of distance run…"  Perhaps the best way to do this is to begin with a set of questions we can ask ourselves as teachers of writers: How are we currently spending the limited time we are given? How can we revise the way we spend our time in workshop to be more effective/productive? Is this the right lesson for these students right now (a question we can ask ourselves daily)? Is this learning experience worthy of the time it will take us to do it right? Is there another way - a better way - to approach this concept/learning? What is essential here? Important to know? Necessary to learn as a stepping stone to the next concept/skill? How can we give students more opportunities to write? To have choice? What do our students need from us right now?"

"In the second half of the year, my writing course shifts to a more focused study of argument. We read and analyze several mentor texts together as a class, starting with speeches and letters, including an in-depth analysis of the classic  "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. (this year, I also paired King's text with "The Future Needs Us" by Rebecca Solnit and the introduction from Writings on the Wall by Kareem Abdul Jabbar). But the key to teaching students how to analyze argument-particularly in today's media rich world-is to make the time and space for students to take what they have learned and apply it independently. (In fact, that's true when you teach anything.) So this year, I changed up my argument unit a bit to include a two-week workshop period in which students would: Read several arguments from a variety of media (written, visual, auditory, film); Analyze the arguments for their line of reasoning; Write their own original essay which defends, challenges, or qualifies a claim made by one (or more) of the arguments they studied."

Vonnegut's instructions: As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. "This above all ..." I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story. Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. "Except ye be as little children ..."