Talks With Teachers

Should interest and engagement be measured? Download on iTunes for Your Morning Commute  Have you felt the guilt? C’mon, you know the feeling, I certainly have had it. It is the torment from those neglected assignments that sit on your desk far too long only to be shoved in a folder and hidden in drawer to be further avoided. If you are like me, you eventually come to your senses and realize that there is no escaping the grading, and while you hate yourself for procrastinating all along you never take that step to stop it the next time. This week I collected 78 essays from my AP Literature students. Two and three page responses that asked them to connect How to Read Literature Like a Professor with 1984. Along with those 200-or-so pages of essays, each student completed a multi-page project. It is self-inflicted torture. In the past the sheer volume of that paper load would intimidate me. Like the dishes, no matter how much progress I made, I knew there would be more tomorrow. But that’s in the past. This yea