The Reasons

If you ask my mom what I learned in school, her response would be that I learned nothing.  The reason she believed this is because everyday I would get home and my mother would ask me about my day and I would tell her we did nothing.

This is one of the reasons that I wanted to start this blog.  I want you to see that we are in fact not up to "nothing" in our room.  I want you to see the books, articles, poems, and other texts that we are reading.  I want you to hear about the conversations that we are having with each other.  I want you to see the amazing writing that the authors in our room are creating.  I want you to see it all.  That is why I  plan to blog each day filling you in on the happenings of our room.  If I slack off on this goal, you should call me out.

Another reason I wanted to start writing was I think school has changed a lot since I was a student.  I do not remember teachers using terms like metacognition or schema or inferences (although maybe they did, remember I learned nothing).  I do not remember writing territories or learning about a writer's craft or about sentence smack down.  I do not want this "teacher language" to get in the way of you having a conversation about our day.  Hopefully by posting our posters and talking about the professional books that I read, you can know this "teacher language" and be ready when your conversation gets around to schema.

Finally I want to show the students that I am a writer.  I will ask your students to write.  I think it is important, very important.  If I want my students to write, I should show them the possibilities of writing.  Here is a possibility...a blog.

I hope this blog helps you find whatever you need, but what I want from it most is for it to help you have conversations about our day.

I want this blog to give you a look inside room 215!