HC English Department

"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"

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

"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."

"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 "

"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."

"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?"

"Without strong guidance from teachers, students may opt for the easiest path instead of the one offering the best learning experience"

"What Is Workplace Writing? Though employer surveys tend to be vague about the specific skills in "written communication," studies and interviews do show some consistent requests, including the ability to analyze and explain concepts and situations succinctly, engage in clear and courteous conversations, present evidence-backed arguments and requests, and switch tone and format to respond to different audiences."

"Was I teaching argumentation to empower my students? Of course. But by teaching them to focus on finding evidence to support claims, I was achieving the opposite effect. I was making them susceptible to an epidemic of our time: the tendency to select facts that support a certain perception of reality, rather than discerning what reality is by analyzing observations and facts. With this in mind, I shifted my focus to the work that needs to happen before one makes an argument-the work of looking at the world. I designed projects that would allow students to look deeply at an issue."

"There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways."

"Employers say they have trouble finding new hires with good oral-communication skills. But relatively few regular public K-12 schools explicitly teach those skills, and even fewer teach them with real-world workplace scenarios. That mismatch doesn't bode well for young people's job prospects, or for companies searching for new talent. In survey after survey, employers say they need people who are good communicators. And they say that strong speaking skills are even more important than good reading or writing skills."

"There's something deeply personal about appraisals of our teaching. It's not just our professional competence that's wrapped up in an observation, but a sense of our worth as human beings. In walks an administrator, often at the worst possible moment, and suddenly our flaws loom in our minds like the distorted reflection in a funhouse mirror. So for those of us who die inside every time an observer walks into our classroom, what can we do about it?"

"Much of a teacher's day is devoted to instruction, with precious little time set aside for collaborating with colleagues, planning lessons or reflecting on practice, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. The authors of "Reimagining the School Day" point out that U.S. educators spend far more time teaching lessons and less time planning them than educators in other top-performing countries. In a typical work week, U.S. teachers spend about 27 hours delivering lessons, compared with their counterparts in Singapore, who teach 17 hours each week, or to teachers in Finland, who log 21 hours a week. The authors cite a survey of 120 U.S. school districts that shows that just 45 minutes of a typical teacher's 7.5-hour workday is dedicated to planning. What's more, the authors say, teachers could benefit from observing each other, but there's no time built into the school day to do such observations. Unless, that is, schools begin to rethink the school day. The report highlights five schedules that aim to revamp how teachers spend a typical school day. All the schedules include more time for teachers to work together to plan lessons, flexible instruction blocks that allow teachers to tailor instruction to students' particular needs, and opportunities for small-group instruction and student-directed learning."

"Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at the University of Nebraska, and later researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise"

"We are trying out a new feature. Call it writing practice (with a nod to Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," where I first encountered the term). Or virtual workshopping.  Or maybe simply shop class. The goal is to break down the work that goes into creating stories, and offer prompts or small suggestions to help you practice that work. The assignment: to see beyond first sight. To sit long enough in one place to get past surface impressions and personal projections, and try to see what more lie before them. To draw on their other senses: sound, smell, taste, touch. Finally to see even beyond those physical senses to memory, metaphor, history and emotion. In other words, to see the possibility of stories. To notice, question, wonder - and write it all down."

"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.""

"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."