Apparently, for $16.36, you can buy a tub of communion wafers from Amazon. And I know this because a student of mine came to class the other day with a tub of communion wafers. He was passing them out. Snacks for his classmates. At first, I was just sort of dumbfounded. It was a brandContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days, Part Deux”
Category Archives: Teaching
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days
In my neck of the woods (Portland, Oregon) there has been some media attention paid recently to a terrible new development inside elementary school classrooms: violently disruptive children. The problem is exacerbated by an interpretation of State Law that says that a teacher can never touch a student unless that student is in imminent danger.Continue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: Kids These Days”
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: We Should Be Angry Most of the Time, But for Some Reason. . .
There are things that should infuriate public school teachers about our jobs. Here’s just one: It is an impossible gig; to wit, there is not enough time in the work day to do the job we have been asked to do, or rather, the job that we would like to do, the job that weContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: We Should Be Angry Most of the Time, But for Some Reason. . .”
#317: On Not Being Able to Remember a Student’s Name
She sat right in front of me, in the first row, as it were, and I called her by name, the wrong name. She looked at me. She said, “Who?” And I thought, and maybe I said out loud, “Oh my god.” And even while I knew it was the wrong name, for the lifeContinue reading “#317: On Not Being Able to Remember a Student’s Name”
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: When is a Frog Just a Frog?
So the school year, thus far, is cooking right along. I like my 9th graders. And that’s no little thing to say. For the most part, they are positive, respectful, willing, and mostly ready for prime time. There are some exceptions, of course, as always, and, of the three groups of 9th graders in myContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: When is a Frog Just a Frog?”
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: It’s Raining and I’m Flying By the Seat of My Pants!
Yesterday I made a video blog so I could test my new microphone, and during part of my little talk there I kind of bemoaned the fact that it had been so long since my last entry, months, in fact. Afterwards, I was struck by this single observation: It took me three and a halfContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year, Redux: It’s Raining and I’m Flying By the Seat of My Pants!”
Michael Tests the Mic
So, I got a new USB microphone. It’s the Yeti Pro from Blue Designs, and it’s pretty much the inspiration for this, the first blog entry I’ve made since July. Sorry that I’ve been so long away. I hope you missed me just a little. I decided to shoot a video and I talk hereContinue reading “Michael Tests the Mic”
Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year: June 12, 2018
Please excuse my absence. After 30 poems over the 30 days of April, one needs a little rest. But on top of all that, I’ve been having a transformative experience. On Sunday, May 20, I came down from the mountaintop. My hair turned white and now looks blown back by a great force of energyContinue reading “Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year: June 12, 2018”
#310: An Elegy for the Essay in English
I read his essay out loud the way it appeared on the page. In about five hundred words the student used two paragraphs, and, beyond a single period at the end of the first paragraph, used no commas, no semi-colons or colons, no dashes, no quotation marks, and no more periods, not even at theContinue reading “#310: An Elegy for the Essay in English”
#305: The Offending Journal
I’ve seen students copy all kinds of stuff from one another, sometimes going as far as copying down word for word pages upon pages of a buddy’s journal responses, the act of copying all that text more work than actually doing the work, only with the added “benefit” of not learning anything. But I’ve never seenContinue reading “#305: The Offending Journal”
michael jarmer 