English Teachers Chat

I'm two weeks into teaching Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds, and I won't lie, it's some of the most invigorating work of my career. Now for some transparency before we move on: I do teach at an affluent school district with a largely white population, and I have exactly zero students who are Black. That said, I still have quite a few BIPOC students. It's for this, and so many other reasons, my 9th grade team decided to utilized Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You , and it's nothing short of some of the most important work of my career. I'll start with the biggest challenge: slowing it down. Whole class texts are not my strong suit. In a given year, I might have 4 or 5 whole class texts, 4 or 5 book club units and countless amount of independent books. And when I get into whole class texts, I try not to labor them. The days of 5 or 6 weeks in a book seems antiquated. And yet (YET!), Stamped deserves our time. We need to take it slow to unpack oursel...

Yesterday I released my Top Books of 2020 . Today, I wanted to give some attention to the top YA books of the year. Young adult literature is doing what adult literature can't keep up with: diversity. More diversity and experimentation is occurring for young adults than their adult contemporary counterparts. I hope the publishing industry is noting this because they need to fix this problem. I also must thank the Project Lit Community which brought to light so many amazing diverse authors to my attention this year.  As per usual, any books on this 2020 list was published in 2020. Give any one of these books a read and you'll be a better person for it. For a one page printable of this list, click here . So without further ado: 1. This is My America by Kim Johnson Tracy’s father sits on death row and she continues to write to the Innocence Project in the hopes to free him. With time waning, Tracy needs to stop the wrongful execution, but the people with power are controlling mu...

This year, I managed to read 157 books in 2020. And while 2020 sucked in so many ways, books were not one of them. As per usual, my top 10 books are books only composed of books published in 2020. So while I read some other remarkable books (and some that would near the top of this list), they were excluded to keep the focus on what's present. In terms of trends, I'm happy to say that my list was full of more diversity than ever before with half the authors of some minority. There's still a long way to go. This year, I'll also be writing my top 10 YA books of the year , so look forward to that later this week. For a one page printable of this list, click here . So without further ado: 1. The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett Is there any book more worthy of our attention than Bennett’s masterpiece? No book felt more pressing. A novel about race, American identity and the American Dream, the story of twin sisters who go and live completely different lives is unlike anythin...