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A New School Year

I'm excited about the upcoming school year. Not only do I have some new practices I plan to develop in my classes, but there are changes that my team is anticipating (or perhaps are apprehensive about). I plan to start a blog for my classes, on which they will respond to the class novels they're assigned; and, in class, I plan to teach units, or at least projects, based on those novels. This last part, especially, will be a significant change from my previous teaching because the themes will be related to a single historical fiction story and will come from a single author's perceptions over a long-term reading of a novel, rather than from several short stories written by several authors. In short, I hope to build relevance by basing our understanding of literature on an author's understanding about life.

This quality, relevance, has always been my foundational principal as a teacher, but I have not always put this principal into practice. I have had good intentions in the past, however, and have not always followed through, so I hope I can find a way to teach everything students need to learn while making their learning meaningful. Failing to make our learning relevant has been my weakness in the past, and I hope to overcome it, incorporating relevance as the centerpiece and long-term practice of students' learning rather than seeing relevance through temporary, short-term projects.

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