Chalkboard drawings: The “Hogwarts” edition

I draw a picture of myself on my classroom’s chalkboard everyday. I collect those pictures as camera phone photos and post them on Sundays. See the rest here.

Check out my students’ new ‘zine!

Super excited to be helping my students premiere and promote their latest literary ‘zine effort this weekend at the Gem City Comic Con in Dayton Ohio. Last year we did Sherlock Holmes… this year, we look at Bram Stoker’s Dracula!

The kids did a great job on this one and if you’re in the area, please come and check out our panel, it should be awesome!

Teaching Comics: Shakespeare Charades

I wanted to repost this comic from a few years ago as a counterpoint to yesterday’s strip where I take teachers to task for heavily relying on old ideas and lessons.

I didn’t mean to make it sound like teachers should NEVER use old lessons and ideas – indeed, building a reliable stable of working LPs you can fall back on is the cornerstone of a decades long career as an educator. You can’t do brand new things every second of your day. I was more taking aim at teachers whose entire repertoire is “read the story, answer the questions, quiz on the story and questions on Friday.” If Wednesday’s comic didn’t read that way, apologies.

The lesson in the above comic strip is one I’ve been using to great success for years; it’s become a student favorite. I pulled the idea from the Folger Shakespeare Library, but they don’t seem to have a proper link for the lesson any longer. I thought I’d share some of my armchair rationale behind the cut for what I’m doing here.

Teacher Comics: Teachers Just Going Through the Motions

I mean no disrespect here; I have worked with senior teachers who are every bit as keyed in and passionate as they were when the first started working with students… but I know I’m not wrong here.

Teacher Comics: Chicken Enchilada

You can tell this was drawn during a standardized testing proctoring session because it has almost nothing to do with teaching or education. Hey, it’s a lot like standardized tests that way!

Teacher Comics: This is your brain on nostalgic headwear

 

This might be my favorite comic I’ve ever done.

Teacher Comics: PARCC wrap up

Did anyone else reading this have the problem I’m talking about with the TAB button? It’s not a joke, on some of the tests, if our students hit the TAB button, it was like the kill screen on Donkey Kong.

Teaching Comics: PARCC, Day Six (sort of)

Teacher Comics: Wicked Burn on Demi Moore

For anyone who’s ever seen it, the ’95 version of The Scarlet Letter watches more like an adaptation commissioned by Cinemax with the edict, “Get rid of all that Puritan stuff and make it sexy!” It’s a terrible film.

There IS, in fact, a pretty decent mini-series adaptation of The Scarlet Letter from 1979, starring Meg Foster and John Heard. I do end up showing some of that to my students eventually.

Teacher Comics: Easy A

 

I’ve talked about this as a pet peeve of mine as far as it goes with teachers – I feel like there’s WAY too much lesson planning that barely goes as far as “we read the book, then we watch the movie.” It’s one of the reasons I go out of my way to try and teach books for which there are no movies.