English Teachers Chat

This year I'm interested in students expressing themselves with not only a literary lens but with digital elements. Thanks to my wonderful colleague, Allison Mitchell, I was introduced to the wonderful world of one-pagers. A one-pager is a single page that blends and collages quotes, analysis, and images to form a cohesive expression . The Requirements: As detailed from Teach Writing , the best part about the requirements is that they're malleable to suit your needs. All four of my classes needed to include quotations, focus on a specific character and include multiple pictures and sketches of these ideas. But depending on the class, there were different elements that changed the focus. 9th graders were tasked to choose a metaphor from the text that thematically links to the one page. Think about what is the literal and figurative metaphor. Show it in visuals and describe it in text. My American Wilderness (upper level 11th/12th grade students) needed to demonstrate an ...

In our second episode of English Teachers Chat, Daniel Valentin interviews Dr. Tony Sinanis, author of Hacking Leadership. Together, they discuss some of their favorite LGBTQ books. Links to all the books discussed: Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang George by Alex Gino Pet by Akwaeke Emezi Other books mentioned: Hacking Leadership by Joe Sanfelippo and Tony Sinanis Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro Music from the podcast c/o Kevin MacLead. You kind find more of his royalty free music at incompetech.filmmusic.io/ Daniel Valentin teaches American Wilderness, Ethics, and English 9 at Horace Greeley High School. He is currently reading The Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay  and listening to Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. He wants his students to feel empowered through books. Follow him  @DaValentinCCSD

October is LGBTQ history month. This is the perfect opportunity to expose our students to LGBTQ texts. For me, this is essential. As a student, the closest I could find to LGBTQ characters were Tom from The Glass Menagerie , the random David Sedaris piece and Michael Thomas Ford's books (which as a teenager I was way too young to be reading about). Now, there's a number of LGBT characters and representation in literature, but if you're an educator, where do you start? What I'm hoping is that my students will see queer texts not as queer texts, but simply texts. Often times (and not to generalize, but here I go anyway) my straight male students will avoid anything with even a hint of gay subtext. The more I talk to my students, it's clear that there is still an internalized insecurity. What they read might say something about themselves. In truth, a book is a book, queer characters or not. The easiest way to break the ice with that stereotype is that I always tel...