HC English Department

We grown-ups often assume that children are oblivious to our money talk, ignorant of our budget woes and uninterested in how adults make financial decisions. Better to protect them from all that for as long as possible, right? But the best entries of this year's crop of college application essays about money prove that they are watching and listening - always - and picking up every little thing by osmosis."

"The excerpt below is from the book "Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond," by Larry Ferlazzo. This excerpt is from the chapter entitled "I Still Want to Know: How Can You Get Students More Interested in Reading and Writing?"

"What teachers say they really need isn't free food and a once-a-year exercise in flattery. What they want, they say, is for their profession to be respected in a way that accepts educators as experts in their field. They want adequate funding for schools, decent pay, valid assessment, job protections and a true voice in policy making."

"Many of my first-year college students have been battle-trained in writing thesis statements by the time I get them. But rather than opening doors to thought, the thesis quickly closes them. Instead of offering a guiding hand, the thesis carries a baseball bat, muscling its way into writers' thoughts and beating information into submission. What I'm talking about is the thug thesis, the bully who hangs with the five-paragraph theme and similar forms of deductive writing. Unfortunately, this thesis-an anathema to academic inquiry-is the one most students know best. I'm not arguing against teaching students how to write a thesis statement. What bothers me is how thoroughly this convention dominates our discussions about what is meant by strong academic writing. The thesis has been hogging the bed, and it's time to make more room for its tossing-and-turning partner in academic inquiry: the question."

""Instead of measuring difficulty in terms of information retrieval, or amount of homework, the new standard of personal rigor puts thinking and intelligent behaviors at the forefront. How a student expresses those personal qualities become the standard for capability and performance. In effect, we're starting to redefine what is 'hard' in school." So what happens when a school takes the shifting digital landscape seriously, acknowledging how the brain works, the essential need for intrinsic motivation, the reality of the declining value of fixed knowledge, the importance of social and emotional learning, and the critical need to focus on learning how to learn in new and dynamic ways?"

For those of you who do the movie/book comparison essay: "If I have a relationship with a book and it's poorly done on the big screen, on some level, I'm galled. But on the other hand, not every movie can be "Watchmen," and by now, I should be able to accept the nuance of adaptation, being an adult and all. On the whole, I'd argue that haggling over which is better, the book or the movie, is mostly pointless. The operative word being "mostly." Because there are extreme cases where book-lover rage is justifiable. Which cases? I pulled the Metacritic critic ratings of the top 500 movies on IMDb tagged with the "based on novel" keyword.1 I then2 found the average user rating of the source novel for each film on Goodreads, a book rating and review site.3 In the end, there was complete data for 382 films and source novels."

Short video that illustrates Shakespeare's influence using movie clips.

TED-Ed Video with quiz: "It can be hard sometimes, when speaking, to remember all of the grammatical rules that guide us when we're writing. When is it right to say "the dog and me" and when should it be "the dog and I"? Does it even matter? Andreea S. Calude dives into the age-old argument between linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists - who have two very different opinions on the matter."

Happy National Poetry Month! Not only do we offer this month's Poetry Pairing, featuring Kirby Knowlton's "viewfinder" matched with a 2014 article, "Tangled Web of Memories Lingers After a Breakup," by Nick Bilton, but we are also currently running a Found Poem Student Contest as well as an open poetry discussion forum. Join us. To view all of the Poetry Pairings we've published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"Pearson would like to become education's first major conglomerate, serving as the largest private provider of standardized tests, software, materials, and now the schools themselves. To this end, the company is testing academic, financial, and technological models for fully privatized education on the world's poor. It's pursuing this strategy through a venture called the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund. Pearson allocated the fund an initial $15 million in 2012 and another $50 million in January 2015. Students in developing countries vastly outnumber those in wealthy nations, constituting a larger market for the company than students in the West. Here in the US, Pearson pursues its privatization agenda through charter schools that are run for profit but funded by taxpayers. It's hard to imagine the company won't apply what it learns from its global experiments as it continues to expand its offerings stateside.

On Thursday, April 14, we'll be conducting a live-moderated discussion of a poem, using these three questions: What's going on in this poem? What do you see, or read, that makes you say that? What more can you find? Just as with our Monday forums, live moderation will take place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern, although of course students and teachers will be welcome to continue commenting after that point."

Our Found Poetry Contest is our oldest blog tradition, and one we're thrilled to see embraced by teachers across the curriculum. No matter what you teach, consider it an invitation to have your students find and closely-read relevant New York Times articles - and have a little fun while they do it. Everything you need to know is below, with links and tips galore."

"Lo, revel thee in this gay retelling of a hero's gambit in the face of sinister scribes, circa 2001."

"In this Teaching Channel video, McComb leads a class period where he's trying to give individual students feedback as they work and not only after they've turned in their assignments. He demonstrates how he tries to hold back from giving them the answers, instead guiding them with questions, making sure they are aware of and are using resources, and crucially allowing them the time and space to think through what he's asking and arrive at a solution on their own. McComb is doing a lot in this lesson. He's helping a few students work on a specific skill they lack; he's checking in on students working independently; he's conferencing with students who are having individual problems; and he's trying not to just give students the language that will improve their writing. McComb calls this practice a structure that's flexible and allows for short cycles of work that give him an opportunity to address problems and give real-time feedback. He's hoping this new approach to writing feedback will not only improve his students' work, but will also help them to become more independent learners."

"The earlier that kids begin planning their college application, the better, and that's the reason the digital locker can be used as early as ninth grade, according to University of Chicago Deputy Dean of Admissions Veronica Hauad, speaking for the coalition, which is made up of more than 80 top public and private universities and colleges (including the Ivies and distinguished research universities). She said that even if nothing from the first couple of years of high school is actually ever used in final college applications, the practice of putting quality work into digital storage "gets them thinking critically" about college."

"The growth of skill tends to be exponential on the front end and incremental on the back. This is not to say I'm so grand a writer, but it is to say that by applying the skills below, you can be. Each technique below increased my writing skill dramatically (Meaning when others read my writing, they don't immediately question if English is my primary language, anymore)."

It's often hard to justify watching a two-hour film when there's so much else that has to be done. But, what about an eight-minute film? That's the average length of our Film Club features, and these short documentary films do much more than just entertain. They challenge assumptions and offer new perspectives. They tell stories that often remain hidden, and introduce us to people and places foreign to us. As with other short texts like stories, poems and articles, mini-documentary films can stimulate discussion, debate, thinking and writing. And, they can serve as a refreshing break from print media to help students explore curriculum themes and practice important literacy skills. Below, we present eight films we've featured in our Film Club series that have already captured students' and teachers' attention. In addition, we offer practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries, or films like them, to teach close reading and critical thinking skills."

"If this year's National Poetry Month inspires you to give daily poetry a go in your classroom, maybe even just for the month, consider these four reasons why starting class with a poem each day will rock your world. Just for good measure, I've included a few poem suggestions as well."