HC English Department

Love these questions as writing prompts. And if you have your students respond to them on the NY Times Learning Blog, it also becomes a writing for a real audience.

One tool with potential for improving students' ability to convey thoughts and ideas effectively through text is classroom-based writing assessment. Such formative assessments allow teachers to gauge the effectiveness of their instructional practices, modify instruction as needed, and provide students with feedback on writing strengths and areas in need of further development. Watch video of the event or listen to it below.

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. Are there applications for the classroom? Anyone can submit there own Op-Doc.

Youtube's new teacher channel: "Spend more time teaching, less time searching"

Rap version of The Elements of Style.

The day after TODAY reported on the baffling case of 12 teenage girls at one school who mysteriously fell ill with Tourette's-like symptoms of tics and verbal outbursts, a doctor who is treating some of the girls has come forward to offer an explanation. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, a neurologist in Amherst, N.Y., says the diagnosis is "conversion disorder," or mass hysteria. "It's happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It's a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it," Mechtler told TODAY on Wednesday. "The bottom line is these teenagers will get better." On the show Tuesday, psychologist and TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz noted that just because the girls' symptoms may be psychological in origin doesn't make them any less real or painful.

Atticus Finch is one of the greatest fictional dads of all time, and in honor of the film's half-century mark, both his daughters spoke to CNN. That is, Peck's real life daughter, Cecilia Peck, and the actress who played Scout, Mary Badham. By all accounts, Peck, who won the Academy Award for his portrayal of Atticus, embodied his character's values on and off screen. "He was an Atticus," Cecilia Peck said. "He really was that kind of father to me and my brothers. I believe that he was always very much like Atticus but I think that doing the film when we were very young made him become even more that way and I think as much as he put of himself into the role, Atticus became him, too."

"Carrie is a professor at a university. She had asked me how to turn an area of her expertise, secondary school education, into writing that the general public would find rewarding and enjoyable. That's when I began talking about scenes, using her accident as an example of how to approach her work. Almost all creative nonfiction, essays or books, are, fundamentally, collections of small stories - or scenes - that together make one big story."

"Last year, Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross, who work at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J., a school that U.S. News ranks as the No. 1 S.T.E.M. school in the nation, created short daily reading and writing prompts for their students to use with that day's Times. They told us they wanted to do it again this year, but wanted to tailor the tasks more closely to Common Core demands. So we agreed. Each week, they will send us the questions they tried in class that they and their students felt were the most successful. So, beginning Sept. 21, each Friday you'll find three quick, classroom-tested tasks that ask students to do Common Core-focused work with that week's Times. Our hope is that you'll see at least one each Friday that works for you, and that you'll write in and help us shape the feature as we go. It's an experiment, after all."

To write well you have to be attentive, to both external and internal worlds, examine your reactions to them, and express your thoughts clearly. Writing lets you explore precision and beauty in words, sentences, and paragraphs. It imbues a writer's life with meaning. All writers know this, even though this facet of their work is often lost in the quotidian struggle to earn a living, let alone "succeed" as a writer. Writing about science combines the joys of these two ways of paying attention to nature

Two websites that illustrate how Shakespeare has influenced our language.

Besides being an interesting resource for information (depending on article and author), this might be a way for students to get some work published on the web.

Ike once warned of the miliatry industrial complex and now Ravith warns of the new edu-entrepreneurial industry. That is the ground we feel shifting under our feet.

limits of standardized tesing and comparisons to Finland (beloved of the more testing folks)

Collection of article from The New York Times regarding the issues surrounding and within our profession. Well worth your time!

A nice overview of PLCs and how they work

Other than a mention of the need to "evaluate information from multiple oral, visual, or multimodal sources," there is no specific reference in the common standards to critical analysis and production of film, television, advertising, radio, news, music, popular culture, video games, media remixes, and so on. Nor is there explicit attention on fostering critical analysis of media messages and representations. A 1999 national survey of state standards found elements of media literacy in almost every state's teaching standards. As states adopt the common-core standards, the result may actually be a reduced focus on media and literacy instruction formally contained in state standards. We therefore recommend four ways to address the common standards' limited focus on media/digital literacies:

These student writing sample papers are organized by trait, score, and grade level. The student sample papers are scored on all traits except presentation. We did not score presentation because the papers have been retyped for publication and are no longer in student handwriting or student-produced word processing

Show Don't Tell writing resources

Debate on teaching writing in public schools