There are many reasons I’m voting for Joe Biden this fall for President. Here’s one: Out of all the people the Republican Party could choose to have speak at its convention, they chose the McCloskeys from St. Louis, a pair of personal injury lawyers who gained 15 minutes of fame for their stunt of pulling Read More
An elementary school orchestra makes a terrible sound, and any parent who tells you otherwise is a liar. But as my daughter’s orchestra conductor led his beginners through a simple song in their first ever concert last year, he smiled broadly, kept the beat with emphatic arms, and seemed to hear only beautiful sounds.
When my wife and I sat down at our daughter’s 5th grade parent-teacher conference last week, we hoped to get a sense that the teacher understood our daughter and her strengths and weaknesses. But we didn’t. Instead, the teacher provided us with a litany of numbers and test results the school and the education-testing industry Read More
My students don’t get to cover big stories very often, so when one of our sports teams makes it to the state title game, we definitely consider it a big story day. This year, when the girls soccer team of our school was playing for the state championship on Oct 31, my online editor-in-chief decided Read More
Our students use a lot of tools in their work as journalists; they use physical tools such as computers, phones, recording devices, card readers, and cameras, but they also use software tools such as InDesign, PhotoShop, and Microsoft Word. It seems that in the last five years, there’s been a veritable explosion of new tools Read More
I urge my journalism students to think about their readers when they write––to make sure their stories are engaging from the first word and to think about what their readers already know, what they want to know, and what they need to know. After they finish writing and we’re laying out the print edition Read More
Every year I struggle with how to grade my journalism students –– they all have different responsibilities and assignments, and there just isn’t an easy formula for grading all the things they do. Some students write, some take pictures, some design pages, some copyedit, and some lead and coordinate –– none of it translates easily Read More
Arthur Boyle joined my Journalism class as a senior –– he had taken my AP Comp class last year, and during spring registration, I badgered him enough about taking journalism the following year that he finally gave in. I love it when AP Comp students join the journalism class as seniors –– they offer a Read More
With every student I’ve taught, the writing process varies––some students can write beautiful first drafts and some require dozens of drafts to get there. Critiquing a story, like writing one, is an art, and the writing teacher’s and editor’s job is to sense the needs of each writer and help him or her build a Read More
My journalism students have been publishing an online edition for five years now, and it’s only in the last two years that they’ve really figured out how to do it right. When we first launched our website, it was a novelty, an afterthought, a place where we deposited our stories after they were printed, hoping Read More