Writing Essays View more presentations from Andrew B. Watt. One of the teachers I seem to visit with the most regularity doesn’t work at my school. He doesn’t even live in Vancouver, or British Columbia, or Canada. But I read about what goes on in Mr. Watt’s classroom through his blog – which I have […]
Read more "Andrew B. Watt's Essay Encouragement"As the TALONS class sets out on a novel study that will see them reading a range of five different novels in small groups, much of their “work” in flushing out the themes, symbols and technical aspects of the stories will be happening on their blogs, a process I am not alone in harbouring excitement […]
Read more "Novel Study Blog Post Topics"This week the Talons English class will be embarking on a novel study in a manner different from what we have explored in the past. Previously, the group of 28 students – completing requirements for English 9, 10 and 11 at the honours level – has undertaken the study of a single book that has […]
Read more "Novel Study Preview"About a week ago, a member of our school’s professional development committee announced that, as a means of furthering conversation between our school-based pro-d days, she would be making a habit of sending (via email) a series of weekly “energizers,” or prompts to further our staff’s thinking. Immediately, this struck me as an opportunity to […]
Read more "Twitter Startup Instructions & a Challenge to a Colleague"The other night my teaching partner and I, along with two of our students, gave a brief presentation to our local School Board Trustees outlining the basic tenants of our Autonomous Learner Model-inspired two-year gifted students program. At the conclusion of our small talk, our superintendent offered praise to our learners’ poise and confidence in […]
Read more "Think Different (Or: Do as we say, not as we do.)"Last day of semester 1: Intro to Guitar 11 from Bryan Jackson on Vimeo. Though it may not get as much attention on this blog – a fact I hope to erode over the course of the next semester – I am also the guitar teacher at my school, and have just completed teaching the […]
Read more "Final Guitar Class of the Semester"I couldn’t rightly follow the last mournful post concerning the demise of Vancouver’s Duthie Books with anything less than this heartwarming – and slightly political in inspiration – look at what technology has lent to what Stefana Broadbent calls the “democratization of intimacy.” As someone with a texting, emailing, (soon-to-be) video chatting mother, who lives […]
Read more "TED Talk: Stefana Broadbent & The Democratization of Intimacy"We began sentence diagramming today (truly, that is; we have been studying grammar in the TALONS class now for almost two weeks, but that was all groundwork for today). Hopefully this driest of units (grammar) will eventually become a competitive and illuminating investigation of language that will help frame our spring-push through the English 9, […]
Read more "Sentence Diagramming & Grammar Resources"Our students are faced with planning cultural outings over the course of the year that occasionally turn into full-fledged field trips. While other events are attended by handfuls of students – it is expected that each TALONS class member attends three cultural events – others take on such a pertinent range of learning opportunities, as […]
Read more "Field Trip: Urban Geography & the Canadian Identity"Yesterday I gave my class a brief quiz to assess their knowledge of the parts of speech, as well as sentence parts. Twenty questions, multiple choice, during the grammar unit. This is not, they tell me, fun stuff. And I’ll admit that putting together their quiz the night before, trying to come up with examples […]
Read more "My students giggle during quizzes"