HC English Department

Posts connected to NY Times articles that can be used as writing prompts.

What are the traits of an essential question? The question probes a matter of considerable importance. The question requires movement beyond understanding and studying - some kind of action or resolve - pointing toward the settlement of a challenge, the making of a choice or the forming of a decision. The question cannot be answered by a quick and simple "yes" or "no" answer. The question probably endures, shifts and evolves with time and changing conditions - offering a moving target in some respects. The question may be unanswerable in the ultimate sense. The question may frustrate the researcher, may prove arid rather than fertile and may evade the quest for clarity and understanding.

Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom.

Enter the NPD Punctuation Haiku Contestand win great punctuation chotchkes

An interesting column on the relevance of TKAM and how it is perceived by black authors and readers.

A newly released study by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) strongly suggests that two factors-a fragmented English curriculum and a neglect of close reading-may explain why the reading skills of American high school students have shown little or no improvement in several decades despite substantial increases in funds for elementary and secondary education by federal and state governments. Three major findings: (1) The content of the literature and reading curriculum for students in standard or honors courses is no longer traditional or uniform in any consistent way.  (2) The works teachers assign generally do not increase in difficulty from grade 9 to grade 11. (3) Teachers do not favor close, analytical readings of assigned works. T 

Defines PBL and provides research, project guides, resources, and examples. 

A-Z authors with short summaries of their works. Also, lesson plans for books are available.

Dittrich sent me this article from NPR commenting on how we are leaving behind literature to pursue "practical education"

For the high-schoolers reading To Kill a Mockingbird today, America is a very different place than it was when Lee wrote her novel 50 years ago. Lee's story of Scout Finch and her father, Atticus - a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man unjustly accused of rape - came out just as the nation was fighting over school desegregation. To Kill a Mockingbird didn't change everyone's mind, but it did open some. And it made an impression on many young people who, like Scout, were trying to get a grip on right and wrong in a world that is not always fair.

Great site discussing style in writing.

"A neuroscientist explains how factors such as light and seating arrangements can affect students' cognitive performance."

"Here's a look inside the tools and methods Preston, who currently teaches three Advanced Placement English and Composition courses, finds essential to his open source learning pursuit:"

"Robert Stahl (1990) identified eight categories of wait time. When we formally introduce wait time, these periods of silence are trans- formed from periods of awkwardness into valuable moments of silence. The first category is the type of wait time we've already discussed: the time between a teacher's question and the student's answer. The other seven are as follows:"

"These resources provide an overview of journalistic writing with explanations of the most important and most often used elements of journalism and the Associated Press style. This resource, revised according to The Associated Press Stylebook 2012, offers examples for the general format of AP style"

This is the article that Andrea sent a link to: "When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas. For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers. So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:"

"As they progress through middle and high school, students are expected to take on increasing responsibility for their learning, with more out-of-class assignments that require independent research, reading for understanding, and wider application of classroom lessons. Our new book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains: Metacognitive Strategies, Activities, and Lesson Ideas, suggests that learning and applying strategies to "explain it to your brain" can help students improve their study habits. We note some of those strategies here."

If you're a regular Times reader, you've no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's Lives column, which has run weekly for decades. But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus, how we relate to animals, living with disabilities and navigating anxiety? In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students' own personal writing, using Times models as "mentor texts," and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding "zombie nouns" to writing "dangerous" college essays."

"At the American Press Institute (API), we put energy into helping news readers of any age understand and evaluate the news they encounter. In our work with youth and media, we generally recommend six basic questions that can be asked about the news you encounter: 1. Type: What kind of content is this - news, opinion, advertising or something else? 2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited, and why should I believe them? 3. Evidence: What's the evidence and how was it vetted? 4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece backed up by the evidence? 5. Completeness: What's missing? 6. Knowledge: Is there an issue here that I want to learn more about, and where can I do that? We are excited to partner with Newsela to offer a way for teachers to begin some of these thoughtful media literacy discussions with their students. Newsela has created an election Text Set that focuses squarely on media literacy. Every article in the set uses some of API's six questions as Annotations to encourage critical thinking - and teachers can use some, or all, of the six questions to guide classroom discussion."