All posts in May 2010

I’ve just finished “grading” 41 portfolios, compilations of my students’ work from sixth to eighth grade. At FA, this is standard practice (and I’m proud we’ve been doing portfolios for about ten years now). But I wonder if our practice of having students print out all their writing is truly the best way. Students in…

My year with the “amazing eighth-graders” is ending. I started calling them that when I watched them on Colonial Day in the fall, a day when they connected on their own the chaos in Lord of the Flies with the disorganization and failing social structure happening in the woods as they tried to establish colonies,…