General

The school year ends. The noise fades. And then the real work begins. More than looking back Reflection is not just a professional exercise. It is not a box to check on an evaluation form or a prompt to answer in a faculty meeting. True reflection goes deeper than that. It asks hard questions and sits with uncomfortable answers. It requires us to be honest about where we succeeded, where we fell short, and where we flat-out failed. And it is some of the most important work a

June is here, and somehow the pressure didn't leave with the students. The guilt is real - no matter what you're doing Some teachers spend the summer planning. Some spend it resting. Some are working a second job or teaching summer school. Some are doing all three before noon on a Tuesday. And somehow, nearly all of us find a way to feel guilty about it. The teacher who planned all summer wonders if she should have rested. The teacher who rested wonders if she should have pla

A new series from Teaching: The Real - coming this Saturday... Pull up a chair. I've been saving you a seat. Here's what this is... This summer, I'm doing something I've been wanting to do for a while. Starting Saturday, May 30, I'm launching a brand new blog series right here on Teaching: The Real. It's called Real Talk @ The Summer Table, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Honest conversations about teaching, learning, growing, and surviving this profession with your pas

It's been a week since the last bell rang. I'm still thinking about it... I almost made it. I held it together through first period. During second period, I could feel it building, that particular ache that only comes in May, in 8th grade, when you realize you're not just saying goodbye to a school year. You're saying goodbye to them. For good. They don't come back next fall. They leave the grade. They leave the building. They leave you. And then one class looked at me, and I

It Starts With You Part 3 of 3| Teaching: The Real Self-Care Series Let me be honest with you. For a long time, I didn't notice. Not because no one was paying attention, but because I wasn't paying attention. To myself. I was so locked into the work, the students, the next unit, the next meeting, the next thing that needed me, that I just… kept going. Head down. Full speed. Didn't stop long enough to check the gauge. And then one day the gauge was empty. And I was surprised.

I have a Bachelor's degree in Secondary Education. I have a Master's in Curriculum and Instruction. I have another Master's in Instructional Design. And I still had to figure it out the hard way. That is not a complaint. It is a confession. If you have ever sat in a professional development session or collaborative meeting nodding along while internally thinking I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, this post is for you. The Kid in the Room When the language

I finished a novel late last night... Sandra Brown's latest release. In my lifetime, I have read A LOT of books. If I had to assign a number, I'd never be able to. My love - no, my passion - for reading began as a pre-teen with Ann M. Martin's The Babysitter's Club series, Christopher Pike's mystery-thrillers, and Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High teen dramas. In all of the many novels I have read, I have never seen a message like the one on the last page before the back co

Self-Care Doesn't Look Like What They Sold You Part 2 of 3 | Teaching: The Real Self-Care Series The wellness industry made a fortune off teachers. And I'm not here for it. Somewhere between the scented candles, the overpriced bath bombs, and the "treat yourself" culture, self-care got hijacked. It became something you had to purchase, plan, and post about. A massage. A girls' trip. A weekend retreat. A skincare regimen that costs more than your classroom supply budget. And i

The Guilt Is Killing You Part 1 of 3 | Teaching: The Real Self-Care Series I was scrolling through Facebook when a post on one of the Middle School ELA groups I follow brought me up short. A second-year teacher had posted something I've heard — and felt — in a hundred different ways over twenty years in this profession. She was tired. Not regular tired. The kind of tired that lives in your bones. And she was struggling to find time to take care of herself. I wanted to reach t

I am a teacher who loves writing just as much as she loves teaching, if not — dare I say it — more. I share that confession without apology, because I think it matters. It matters for my students to see that their teacher is not just an instructor of writing — she is a writer. And writers write. Not just lesson plans and sub notes and parent emails. Writers write because something inside of them will not stay quiet until the words find their way out. That is exactly what happ

There's a moment every ELA teacher lives for — that shift when students stop studying a concept and start living it. In Unit 5: The Art of Rhetoric, that moment didn't just happen in Room 509. It showed up in my inbox. With a subject line. And a very professional closing. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What We Studied Unit 5 was built around one essential question: How do speakers and writers use language to move people to think, feel, and act? To answer that, we didn't jus

Let me be honest with you about something. For a long time, informational text instruction felt like the part of the year I had to get through. Textbook passages. Dry articles about topics nobody — including me — actually cared about. Students staring back at me with that look. You know the one. And then I started asking myself a different question. Not what standard do I need to cover? but what does my student actually need to know how to do in the real world? That question

If you're a teacher, you already know the energy of back-to-school PD week. The enthusiasm is... palpable. 😄 Nobody is thinking about PD. We are thinking about our classrooms, our lesson plans, our students, the actual work waiting for us on the other side of whatever PowerPoint we're about to sit through. But there we were, the entire district, filing into a rented venue for what would become two of the most chaotic professional development days of my career. Nobody warned

February of 2025, I sent my principal a formal email, requesting a new classroom. One of our more seasoned colleagues was retiring, and his classroom was now up for grabs. I'd honestly been quietly coveting his space for quite some time... Our building is old - built in 1939, I am sure it has seen better days. What it has also seen is an influx of students over the years. As such, classrooms are sectioned off with partitions, rather than walls. The moment my hiring principal