HC English Department

Rap version of The Elements of Style.

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

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.

A contest sponsored by the National Writing Project that focuses on narrative voice. It provides resources for developing voice.

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.

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.

StoryCorps is honing in on lessons about learning with a new project for the academic year, called the National Teachers Initiative. It'll feature conversations with teachers across the country - teachers talking to each other, students interviewing the teachers who changed their lives, and more. "I think there is no higher calling than being a public school teacher in this country," StoryCorps founder Dave Isay tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Audie Cornish. "Teachers are feeling under attack and underappreciated," Isay says. "We want to do our part over the next year to turn that around."

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.

Show Don't Tell writing resources

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

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:

How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturyli

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post-almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones-the Web and emails, student papers, business memos-with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

I've always placed punctuation marks (commas, periods) outside of the quotes for anything other than dialogue, feeling like I was breaking the rules (which says that they should be inside). It's nice to know that I was just punctuating in the "British" way!

A nice overview of PLCs and how they work

I'VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter. I don't expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students' daily chatter, as well as the world's conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital. So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers

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

In celebration of Read Across America Day, and of World Read-Aloud Day, both in early March, we offer engaging, short Times essays, articles, op-eds and humor pieces on a range of topics for teachers, parents or students to read aloud. Many of our picks are pieces that someone on the Learning Network staff has field-tested with real, live middle and high school students over the years

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

A great speech that sums up the corporate threats facing education