The last two weeks have been filled with absolute madness here: Halloween, our annual Day of the Dead celebration, the end of quarter 1, parent-teacher conferences, and a 10-year accreditation visit. So, you’ll see (especially for my seventh graders), we haven’t done a ton of learning or work recently. We’re in that stalled momentum moment I sometimes find myself in where I’m trying to move students through a unit but just feel like I’m spinning my wheels.
You’ll also notice on the 8th grade side that after teaching a handful of mini-lessons in our personal essay unit, I had to pause, go back, and reteach some fundamentals about personal essays — including writing my own not-great personal essay and much-better personal essay to show them the difference. (I’m sharing it with you below in case it helps your kids.) I desperately wanted to (and need to) keep going. But if I had, I would have left absolutely everyone behind. So, I recalibrated. Took a pause. Admitted to the kids that something hadn’t worked and we were experiencing a disconnect we needed to fix, and tried again.
Here are my plans from the last two weeks: