English Teachers Chat

I feel like we're not talking enough about genre and authentic voices. When I'm helping students pick out a new book, my first question is, "what are you interested in?" For many of my (and here I'm going to super gender stereotype here) female students, they can point to other texts they've enjoyed. They enjoyed Yolk or Grown or Instructions for Dancing, all amazing texts which can lead to a 100 other recommendations: Off the Record, Love is a Revolution, Kiss & Tell.  But other kids (and often my male students) will say, "I am looking for fantasy, dystopian, war or historical fiction." And while I have plenty of those titles. Many of those titles are from White authors, and I noticed a lack of other voices: Black, Hispanic, AAPI, Muslim, Jewish, etc. that explore these rich genres. I'm sure that's more to do with publishing companies than the authors themselves, but nevertheless, here we are. Underrepresented but more than worthy of our...

Yesterday I released my Best Books of 2021 . Today I return with my best YA books of 2021. All these books were published this year and worth all your attention. I hope you find sometime to read and love. If you want an easy one page printable, click here . 1. Love is a Revolution by Renee Watson I could go on and on about how much I love this book. It manages to capture teenage love and teenage apathy like none other. It’s in a class all its own this year (it also appeared on my best books of the year overall). So many books are trying to be so grand, but sometimes the most intimate stories are the most important ones. This is why I read YA fiction. 2. Off the Record by Camryn Garrett If they decided to turn Harvey Weinstein’s story, serial rapist and atrocious human being, into a YA novel, it would be this. But the book is so much more as you meet Josie, an aspiring journalist, who is thrown into the adult world. These are books that teens need, but everyone will be better for readin...

It's that time of the year again. Summer reading (and a preview of some of my year's favorite books)! Reading shouldn't feel like a chore. This should be a time to engage with texts that YOU want to engage with. As I finish book number 90 (Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon), here's my top 10 picks this year. Just some quick details about this list. All books on this list are 2021. Additionally, this is the YA list; my adult list will be out early next week. So seek and find something that works just for you! (If you want a one page printable list, click here! ) 1. Off the Record by Camryn Garrett In Garrett’s brilliant new novel, Josie is a high school journalist with the opportunity to go on a press tour and write a profile piece on an up and coming actor. But as she starts to do interviews, it’s clear that the director is a “Harvey Weinstein” type with exceedingly questionable behavior. Will Josie confront the issue, and will she come to her own reckoning with ...

Since January, students and I explored Reynold’s and Kendi’s remixed version of Stamped . If you told me in January that it would take two months to complete Stamped , I wouldn’t believe you. Of course, there were snow days and February break that impeded our time with the text, but even accounting for that, Stamped remained an exploration, one that exceeded my expectations each step of the way. As you make your way through the text, you might consider the following: Taking Your Time: Unlike other books like The Glass Menagerie or The House on Mango Street , Stamped required students to unpack their emotions and learn about the many diverse people in the text. I started to look at the Afterword of Stamped as my benchmark. At the end of the text when Reynolds addresses the readers about Angela Davis, James Baldwin and W.E.B DuBois, what will my students think at that moment? I didn’t want students simply to see a list of names. I want those names to mean something. The end result? Lots...

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...

Teacher (/ˈtēCHər/) Noun - 1. a person who teachers, especially in school. 2. A person who opens windows for students to explore. 3. A person whose day extends before and beyond the 7am-3pm work day. 4. A perpetual student. Definition essay is one of the main essay types we teach in English 9 at Horace Greeley. Over the years, the types of definition essays I taught and explored evolved. In the last two years, we explored what it means to be a protagonist using The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.  But call it restlessness or boredom or changing with the times, my definition essay was in need of an overhaul. Enter: Stamped by Jason Reynolds, This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell and nearly a dozen different titles from an #OwnVoices unit. This year, my English 9 team and I are gearing up to teach  Stamped for the first time. We talked about starting the year with it but decided talking about systematic racism on the first day of high school might prove overwhelming...

When I say Anti-Racist books, what do you think? Does you mind go to Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be An Antiracist  or Tiffany Jewell's This Book is Anti-Racist . Great! What else? Anti-Racist texts are topping the charts of every best seller list. Take a look at the New York Times  Combined Print & E-Book Non-Fiction chart for the week of 6/22/20. This is a wonderful first step. Anti-racist texts occupy nine out of the 10 best selling books. But as educators (or even people just reading this random blog post from an ELA teacher in Chappaqua), is that enough?  Short answer: No.  Taking a look at the Combined Print & E-Book Fiction chart for the same week, and you'll see the problem. Anti-racist fiction is largely ignored. This is a problem. It needs fixing. Only two books on here are what I would categorize anti-racist. What's happening to our anti-racist fiction?  1. Are black writers not writing?  2. Are white publishe...