On a recommendation from two people I admire in teaching, I picked up Suleika Jaouad’s book The Book of Alchemy. I just started it, but I can already feel its effects: I want to create and journal and draw and read. I love books that inspire me either to create or to think deeply. This... Continue Reading →
I recently read Ian McEwan's What We Can Know. I marked a passage about memory. I am fascinated by memory right now, especially since attention and memory are so important in learning. I recently read an article that discussed how our attention spans are adversely affected by our social media lives, specifically short-form video. These... Continue Reading →
Recently, I read Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. This book is wonderfully thoughtful, focusing on the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto for the murder of Carl Heine in 1954. Guterson centers racism, injustice, and social inequity in the small fishing village of San Piedro, an island in Puget Sound. As I read the early... Continue Reading →
We’ve been snowed in for DAYS now, and as such, it was a great time to check off some of my yearly reading list. I (Holly) made a list of physical books that I own that I MUST READ before I buy any new books. (Does anyone else have this overconsumption problem with books like... Continue Reading →
Sometimes a passage or a line—whether it’s from a book, an article, a song, a reel, an image, or just an idea spoken to life—inspires my creativity, makes me want to write…something. I don’t always know what that something is until I start composing. But sometimes I know exactly what I want to write about.... Continue Reading →
Sometimes it’s easy to forget the joy of teaching amongst the constant grind. When I forget, it’s because of one main thing—I’m doing more “administrative” tasks than I usually do. At the end of the semester, the administrative tasks seem to pile on and steal, frankly, some of my joy. But I still feel the... Continue Reading →
My students walked into class one day this week talking about their 2025 Spotify wraps. I had never heard of this, probably because I don’t have Spotify. Once the students, in complete disbelief, explained to me what a Spotify wrap was, I couldn’t help but think I needed an NCTE 2025 “wrap” of what I... Continue Reading →
#NCTE25! What an event. We—myself (Holly) and Chris—had our session on our book, Joyful Literacies in Secondary English Language Arts,on Friday at 3:30, and I was predictably nervous about how it would go. As I talked more and more, I felt the nerves wear off, and the realization that I was around wonderfully engaged and... Continue Reading →
by Holly Sheppard Riesco My dear teachers, I have a confession: sometimes, sometimes, I find my own class boring. Gasp! I know! Terrible to admit, but it’s true. My students and I are grinding away at understanding how to develop commentary and how to synthesize different perspectives into our thinking and writing, and while I... Continue Reading →
A few summers ago, I (Katie) attended a conference of English educators where the hottest topic of conversation was the emergence of generative AI in schools. That year it wasn’t uncommon to pass groups of teachers sharing horror stories from the past school year that starred ChatGPT as the evil monster lurking in student writing... Continue Reading →