Build It & They Will Come
I'm sitting here thinking of that old baseball movie where Kevin Costner builds a baseball field in some remote cornfield, and by the magic of the game itself, people begin to flock to that reinvigorated part of the earth. I'm wondering if the same magic can, could,...
A Reflection
Close Your Eyes & See A lot of things in life fall short of the mark, but thoughtfulness has never let me down. For some forty years I have faithfully kept journals of the wanderings of my mind—most of which is lost in some way or another, but the effect...
Assess
A Shop Teacher’s Thoughts on How To Create True Assessment Assessment is a terrifying word. I know my students fear it is just a softer term for the harshness of grading--an even more terrifying word, but if we do not assess everything we do, we become the...
What Writer’s Do
This is perhaps the biggest thunderstorm that I haven’t been in. The lightning is flashing and bolting to the ground, and the thunder is booming in every direction—though it is all five miles away. Here there is no wind or rain. The sky is bright directly overhead,...
The Poet’s Arrow
As with most poets trying to write a poem—in any style— the difficult part is getting started. In the complex swirl of life there might seem to be too many options, or not enough, and so a young poet may look like a confused archer in a chaotic battlefield. What a...
The Great Essay Robbery
Good writers borrow. Great writers steal...And for these essays you are writing, steal from yourself.All of you--both my 8th and 9th grades students--are smack dab in the middle of writing your essays. Everybody is under the gun timewise to finish these essays, so...
Fitz Rubrics
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