HC English Department

"I've used the story of Rudolph as a "mentor text" ever since. At 88 words, Rudolph is shorter than the Jesus parables and the Lincoln speeches, works often praised for their brevity and high purpose. In the digital age, writers need reminders that memorable stories can be told in short forms. I now believe that there may be no more efficient example for teaching the elements of story than Rudolph. I use it to discuss the naming of characters, the telling detail, the inciting incident, the narrative arc, the story engine, the mythic archetype and the big payoff."

"The analysis of a football game directly relates to the analysis of a piece of literature. As a former English teacher and football coach I'm not sure why this didn't hit me earlier, but I'd love to get into the classroom and share this model of analyzing literature with my students "

"While it might not be immediately obvious to all teachers, particularly those who aren't die-hard fans, sports is also an endless source of inspiration for making arguments and throwing down facts. In this lesson, we explore how to use the world of sports to help students effectively develop evidence-based arguments. We suggest three categories for practicing the skill in sports contexts - from making a case for the G.O.A.T. to taking on current sports-world controversies to proposing rules changes to make a sport or tournament better. We end the lesson with a few strategies for bringing debate and argument writing alive in the classroom."

"Analyzing the patterns of first paragraphs from 94 of the most compelling feature articles from The Atlantic, Fast Company, and NYT Opinion Editorials"

"Emma Tsai, an English teacher at Episcopal High School in Houston, and a writer herself, tells us how she teaches with mentor sentences from The New York Times - bite-sized nuggets of excellent writing that her students learn to identify i"

"Two African-American members of the state Assembly have introduced a non-binding resolution calling on school districts in New Jersey to remove "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - widely acclaimed as one of America's greatest literary works - from their curricula."

"Op-ed writing gives us the chance to delve into an issue we're passionate about and illuminate its importance for our readers. It's a powerful genre-with new research revealing the op-ed really does change people's minds. This month, we were honored to have writer, advocate and activist Dr. Anita Heiss with us. As our Guest Judge, Dr. Heiss offered invaluable advice on how to write an op-ed capable of catalyzing change. And today, after considering your compelling arguments, Dr. Heiss is eager to share her picks for Best Entry, Runner Up and Best Peer Review! Read on for her commentary on these original works. We want to send a special thanks to the Journalism Education Association for collaborating with us on this competition and for their commitment to helping young writers find their voice through journalism. "

"Help stressed out, anxious, teenagers with social and emotional learning."

"A new musical explores life in high school in a way that's eerily familiar. It's called Ranked, and it's set in a dystopian world where your class rank - determined by grades and test scores - governs everything from where you sit to what your future holds." This musical, written by a high school teacher, explores some really interesting questions inspired by the students including: "How do we know the difference between who we actually are and what people want from us?" Usually, Granite Bay announces its spring musical by posting headshots of the performers in the hallway. But this year, it tried something a little different: Holmes asked students to anonymously submit personal text messages, exchanges and emails that depicted the pressure the students were under from parents and counselors. One text exchange reads: A: How was the test? B: I got an 86%! A: Oh no what happened? Another: A: I'm watching you B: Where am I currently then A: Failing class They used the messages in a collage that included headlines from recent news stories ("The Silicon Valley Suicides," "Is class rank valid?") and hung it in the hallway instead of the headshots. A banner at the top reads: "Pain is temporary. Grades last forever."

"The longest of the dashes - roughly the length of the letter "M" - the em dash is emphatic, agile and still largely undefined. Sometimes it indicates an afterthought. Other times, it's a fist pump. You might call it the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. A freewheeling scofflaw. A rebel without a clause. Martha Nell Smith, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of five books on the poet Emily Dickinson (the original em dash obsessive), said that Dickinson used the dash to "highlight the ambiguity of the written word." "The dash is an invitation to the reader to make meaning," Dr. Smith said. "It can also be a leap of faith.""

"The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we've pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online. But our main goal is to offer young people a global audience - to, in effect, invite them to add their voices to the larger conversation at The Times about issues facing our world today. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we hope to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become media creators themselves. "

"a list to help your students more easily connect the literature they're reading to the world around them - and to help teachers find great works of nonfiction that can echo common literary themes."

"These lesson plans provide teachers the materials and guidance for students to learn different perspectives on these issues, discuss them, listen to each other in a respectful and civil manner, and appreciate differences while finding common ground. With news and materials from left, center and right sources plus a structured process for discussion, teachers, administrators and parents can be assured that multiple points of view are discussed and respected in a civil, beneficial manner."

"When you tell somebody you grew up in New Jersey, people assume certain things - namely, that your father was the model for Tony Soprano, or that you have a heavy accent that sounds kind of like Brooklyn by way of a kazoo on steroids, or that your home was wedged on the corner of Chemical Factory Lane and Smokestack Way. And there is some truth to this narrow vision of New Jersey. But my New Jersey was Hunterdon County, a beautiful swath of land directly across the river from Bucks County. I ran around fields and forests when I wasn't playing softball on neatly manicured diamonds in pristine parks, or reading books from the well-funded local library. And because I grew up in one of the only remaining agricultural strongholds in New Jersey, where the game butcher wasn't too far from the dirt racetrack, I grew up in a slice of what some pundits call "Real America," which is to say: white, Republican, and far fonder of guns than gays."

"Concept fuels mix of confusion, frustration, and optimism Personalized learning seems like a simple concept-basically, customize teaching and learning to students' individual academic strengths and weaknesses and even their personal interests. But the reality is that the concept is creating quite a bit of confusion and frustration in the K-12 world. What is (and isn't) personalized learning? How much control should students have over when, how, and what they learn? And what about the potential overuse of digital tools in personalized learning programs?"

VIDEO: "Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is often interpreted as an anthem of individualism and nonconformity, seemingly encouraging readers to take the road less traveled. This interpretation has long been propagated through countless song lyrics, newspaper columns, and graduation speeches. But as Frost liked to warn his listeners, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem-very tricky." In actuality, the two roads diverging in a yellow wood are "really about the same," according to Frost, and are equally traveled and quite interchangeable. In fact, the critic David Orr deemed Frost's work "the most misread poem in America," writing in The Paris Review: "This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism. It's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.""

Given the recent rise in podcast popularity, it's no surprise that audio narratives are making their way into the classroom. They offer an engaging way for teachers to merge project-based learning with digital media analysis and production skills. That's why we're announcing our first-ever Student Podcast Contest, in which we invite students to submit original podcasts, five minutes long or less, inspired by one of our 1,000-plus writing prompts. The contest will run from April 26 to May 25, so stay tuned for our official contest announcement next week In anticipation of that contest, the mini-unit below walks students through the process of analyzing the techniques that make for good storytelling, interviewing and podcasting. The activities culminate in students producing their own original podcasts.

"These writing prompts invite students to create short stories and poems, share experiences from their lives, tell us what they think an image is saying, weigh in on hot-button issues, and discover, question and explain scientific phenomena. Here, we've rounded up all the Picture Prompts we published for the 2017-18 school year and organized them by the type of writing they ask students to do. All are still open for comment."

"In half a decade, the number of U.S. adults who are reading poetry has nearly doubled. That's according to the results of a new survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced Thursday that "as a share of the total U.S. adult population, this poetry readership is the highest on record over a 15-year period.""