Adding a meme creation task increases student engagement and can make something as boring as a rules lecture a little more fun.
 I have seen images like this one all over teacher social media; and while it's a great sentiment that parents and teachers alike need to be reminded of, it isn't as powerful or moving as the reminder that I got from an astonishingly insightful student today. I have been teaching in the classroom for twenty years now and this has to be in my top five "WOW" moments.
There is a reason that there is no shortage of MEMEs, Gifs, etc on the internet about just how dreadful meetings are. Meetings suck. Sometimes people try to make meetings sound better by calling them trainings or professional development (aka PD), when it's really just a bad meeting in disguise. Here are three lessons that I have learned from bad PD and how those lessons changed the way I do things in my classroom.  I was thinking about Open House and how we only share our best work. Then I started thinking about what ifs... What if you had your kids include a fail in the work that they share? Isn't that where the learning really happens?  Did you know that Sony had still been making Betamax for all of these years? I stumbled upon an article the other day "Sony is Finally Killing Betamax," and out of nostalgia, I clicked on it. I was surprised to learn that in 2016 Sony announced that they were going to stop making Betamax tapes. Why are they still making Betamax when there are streaming and blue ray? Seriously, who is still buying Betamax in 2016? Can you even watch Betamax on a 4k HDR TV? Then the big question came to me: AM I CLINGING TO BETAMAX IN MY WORK LIFE?  Have you ever seen Jimmy Fallon's Late Night skit called "Dramatic Readings of Bad Yelp Reviews"? I saw a clip in my Facebook feed the other day and it got me thinking...what if students wrote Yelp reviews of their teachers? Are you brave enough to solicit that kind of feedback?   I posted some end of the year ideas on my old blog a few years ago. This is such a great reason why you should be blogging if you haven't started already. It was really helpful to look back on what I had planned that year and reflect on how things went. My blog wasn't the only thing that got an extreme makeover; some of my lesson ideas for the end of the year have been upgraded as well. Some lessons have been formatted to Hyperdocs (digital lessons) so I can share those lessons here with you now. This post will continue to be a reminder of the awesome fun that we have had ending the year, as well as a reminder of fun I hope to have another year.
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AuthorI am a lifelong learner and have had the privilege of also being called a teacher for eighteen years.  Archives
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Like this blog? Are you a middle school English teacher? Check out my 20% time project. Genius Hour isn't just for students; my passion project is called "The Book Somm." It's a separate blog dedicated entirely to my love of literature. I read books and build a menu of paired texts and lessons around the YA novels that I love.
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