School and the City

I posted an image on Instagram recently and got a huge response that I wasn't expecting.  We're all having the same problem, right? I'm glad it's not just me!  If your students are anything like mine, they can tell you what makes a great sentence. They can tell you that it starts with a capital letter, ends with some type of punctuation, has correct spelling and neat handwriting... but they're not doing that in their own writing.  So they have the knowledge, and they also have the application skills. If I ask them how their sentence is looking, they can quickly notice and correct their mistakes.  Apparently, writing with correct conventions hasn't become a habit. I'm not sure if that's related to effort... or what.  So my thought was that if it's related to effort and motivation, what can I do to make my students care more? We talked about what it means to be an author and when we will need to use writing in real life (aka ...

Hey teacher. You're incredible. Do you have a variety of flexible seating options for students to choose from? You're a great teacher. Do you [still] have desks? You're a great teacher, too. The seating options we provide our students certainly impact students' learning environments, but they do not define you as a teacher. Flexible seating is amazing. Search #flexibleseatingclassroom on Instagram, and you'll find more than 5,000 images of gorgeous, modern classrooms. Students are working in spaces that are comfortable for them: couches, bean bags, picnic tables, and so on. Is it for me? No.  It's just not. As a teacher, I like order, and clean lines, and structure. As a student, I like having a spot to call "mine" that I can return to at any time for a feeling of comfort and security. The closest I ever got to flexible seating was when I swapped to tables for a few years. This gave students the ability to choose their own places...