I have a bulletin board directly behind my desk I use to hang the school calendar, lunch menu, schedule, and any time sensitive notices from other teachers I need to remember. As the school year wore down this past year, I started keeping small notes to myself that I wanted to remember for next year. They were scattered and various half-thoughts, exactly the sort of thing that I need to write down before they disappear from my brain forever. On my last work day before vacation, I compiled them all into one sheet, organizing them by topic and expanding on anything that didn't make sense by itself. Here's the final analyzed list:
*Add to pledge -- seeing multiple sides to issues / arguments
*Add to pledge -- "viewing new perspectives" or similar language
*Add to Practices handout -- my stance on standing / stretching during class
*Answer questions each day / week for Lit. R. -- essential questions?
-"What is the plot of x?"
-"What is important about x?"
-"Who is the author of x? What do you know about them?"
*Literary terms -- one/week?
*Lots of practice playing devil's advocate. Create some sort of game?
*Perspectives throughout the year. Reflections from various perspectives
*Start the year w/ Doing Hard Things convo (Dave Stuart)
*"What to look for when you read" lesson should be one of the first lessons of the year (so that when we read excerpts, they can look for style, etc.)
*Plagiarism discussion at beginning of the year. "We usually look at content online, but we need to write our own content. Either about the content we read or something it makes us think about, something it inspires us to create, etc." / "If you copy paste, use quotations. That's totally acceptable and gives more context to your reader. It just doesn't count towards YOUR word count because they aren't YOUR words."
*Create a template for informative AoWs, not just argumentative
*For summaries, teach how to combine sentences.
-"The Old Man and the Sea was written by Ernest Hemingway. It was written in 1951. It was written in Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea is a novella."
-"The Old Man and the Sea was written in 1951 in Cuba and was written by Ernest Hemingway. This book is a novella."
-"The Old Man and the Sea is a 1951 novella by Cuba resident Ernest Hemingway."
*There are two ways to handle any situation. Take situation X (I accidentally ate a bug?):
-The Emotional way: ... (Freak out!)
-The Rational way: ... (Well, I hope I don't get sick, but I suppose it's okay. I wonder how many people accidentally eat bugs each day? I wonder what bugs are made of. Protein?)
-Which way is better?
*Feedback: "I want to read more books." / "Explain better. Use models, exemplars. Write down exactly what you want to say."
