So much to do: There is this website project that I can’t get my hands around. Second drafts of stories to read. Disappointing second drafts as many (not all) have few changes from first drafts (even proofreading!). A second set of papers are coming in Friday! Pronoun homework to look at to see who still…
Author: Kate Tabor
English teacher in a JK-12 school
Twenty Five Years? Really?
…Knowing how way leads on to way…. (Frost) A post, led to a comment, led to a post, led to a photo, that led to an abandoned piece of writing. So, I think I will share it here. More sailing memories. And to be clear, shortly after this Thanksgiving I fell in LOVE with Antigua:…
Knocked Down
This post was started as comment on my friend Paul Barosse’s blog – Paul’s Voyages of Discovery & Etc. Doyle has asked for a story, and as I have 11 costumes to create for the unicycle act at Science Fiction: An Experiment in Circus, I’m going to start with this kernel. Alas, not a garden…
Do I cut NO pronoun slack?
It is clear to me from my own two seventh graders and the seventy-three kids I teach that they have not learned a whole bunch of pronoun usage rules. Three egregious one: Ben and me went to see Mr. Hood. (ow – objective instead of nominative case) He’s bigger than me. (Comparisons use nominative case.)…
Playlist Part 2 – R & B and (just post) college
R &B/Soul/Jazz that I discovered in Chicago Just saying – these artists didn’t get a lot of airplay in South Dakota. If I heard them it was after dark on a clear channel out of Minneapolis or Chicago. Stax stuff especially cool. The Five Stairsteps – “O-o-h Child” (a good song during tough stuff) The…
Reading student stories – playlist
I am looking for suggestions of songs that are motivational, energizing, BUT not too distracting to add to the “I am reading student stories” playlist. No show tunes: I sing along. So here are parts from my playlist: Faves From Middle School and High School Billy Preston – I can still see Charlie Hendrickson leading…
Break
February Recess is upon us. February Recess, where we save up all those days that the public schools take off (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Casimir Pulaski Day) and take a week off of school. Ostensibly, it breaks the flu contagion cycle. I’d like to think that it also breaks up the negativity contagion cycle that…
Poltroon, you say?
We are reading Romeo and Juliet in my seventh grade classes. I think R&J is more of a freshman book, but the frosh English teachers don’t teach it and the 8th grade teacher reads Macbeth with his class, so I gotta figure we can do something with this 400+ year old play that features a…
Let Us Do The Dance of Joy!
Friday was the last day of the longest week of the year. The first week back after the December recess is always tough. No one is on their regular sleep schedule, teachers are beginning to freak out because the semester is ending, it is dark in the morning for the drive to work, and it…
Yoknapatawpha Lite
I’ve got two big writing projects that I am juggling with the seventh grade right now. The first involves local history research, and a colleague and I are presenting it at the state technology conference; the other is a fiction writing assignment that grew out of reading 145th Street Stories by Walter Dean Myers. Myers…
Living on the Lip of Insanity 