Category Archives: Tiz Woo

Student Work Published on KQED Website

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Just before break, sophomore English classes participated in KQED’s Media Challenge: “Rethink School with MindShift”. The project required students to write an argumentative commentary for a two-minute video or oral presentation on the topic of how we could reimagine school.

The most popular topics in my classes were: uniforms, school start times, homework load, and self-paced math.

While students were encouraged to publish their videos to the KQED Youth Media Showcase, so far I’ve only had one student submit her video. And it’s fantastic. I’m so proud of Annabelle Chung for representing Carondelet on this national platform. 

To learn more about the challenge, and other KQED Youth Media Challenges, go here.


Reconnecting With a Teacher From My Past

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As to be expected, AP Literature is heavily focused on literary analysis. And by the end of the first semester, I had a hunch my students needed a breather. So where do you think I turned for inspiration?

To the ENGLISH tab of my 1992-93 high school binder, of course. Yes, I’ve held onto that handy resource, and it has helped me more than once.

This time around, I pulled out a memorable exercise and adapted it for FlipGrid. Students had to list three favorite “sensory details” for each of the five senses, plus a sixth category, an “all around good feeling.” I shared from my own 28-year-old list in a video and presented them with the challenge.

Wow. So delightfully refreshing. It filled me with good feelings for my students and reminded me what it’s like to be 17 or 18. One student described “the sound of opening a new can of tennis balls” and another held up her hands with crooked fingers to show the “all-around good feeling” she experiences when someone grabs onto a chain link fence.

Resurrecting my old list, complete with comments and a sticker from my teacher, put me in a sentimental mood. I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me. I majored in English and became a teacher in part because of her. I don’t so much remember the lessons and lectures and insights about novels that I learned as I remember how I felt in her class. Mrs. Baron treated us with respect. She wanted to know who we were and what we thought. She delighted in her students and supported our becoming young adults by giving us the space to express ourselves and make mistakes. She made me feel interesting and valued. I recall lots of laughter and bonding with my classmates. Her classroom was a special space during a transformative time.

I don’t know why it took me so long to tell her all of this. Perhaps that’s just part of the loveliness of being a self-involved teenager and young adult. And then I didn’t become a teacher for the first 20 years after college.

But the time seemed right over Christmas break, and thanks to the internet I found her. We Zoomed this morning (yay for Zoom!). Anticipation had me emotional for a week. Gratitude, sentimentality, a sense of coming full circle: to be teaching AP Lit now (with three of the same texts on the syllabus) … well, it’s simply a blessing beyond words.

Christine Baron is just as I remembered her. Just as other-centering and gracious. Just as supportive, spirited, and wonderful. She is the type of teacher I want to be. And lucky me, she has offered to stay in touch.

Perhaps with regular contact, I will be able to do more than replicate her assignments. I hope to channel Mrs. Baron’s love and delight. To not lose sight of the preciousness of each of the young people who come into my care on their way to adulthood.

Get 5% Better Each Year–What a Relief!

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Many of you are aware that I’ve been trying to follow 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle. Recently, I attended a day-long workshop by the pair, and they ended with the reminder that we can’t adopt their whole practice at once, but if we can try to get 5% better each year, that will be progress.

Good for me to hear, because at times this year, I felt the authors would be disappointed in me if they knew I had let some things drop. I still have to work against a tendency to see where my practices fell short of the gold standard in 180 Days.

Which prompted me to go back to my notes from last summer. I had jotted down a page of my favorite ideas from the book, the ones I would most want to adopt:

  1. Quickwrites with mentor texts
  2. Write in front of the students
  3. 10-minute reading time at the beginning of class
  4. Have students write more volume but I grade less
  5. Try using criteria instead of rubrics
  6. Get students talking every day
  7. Choice in research
  8. Portfolio grade at the end

Of those eight favorites, I incorporated seven into my teaching practice this year. Woo hoo! Some of the daily activities such as quickwrites and reading didn’t happen every day, but an overall tone was established in my classroom that you are a reader and writer. At the moment, I have stacks of student notebooks on my desk. The volume of their writing makes me so proud of my students. I rarely collected notebooks and gave out nominal points for them. Yet even yesterday, they were writing book reviews and ranking all the books they’d read this year from easiest to hardest.

So yes, more volume and less grading on my part. I also tried out all sorts of single-point rubrics, criteria lists, and other ways to assess, and I tried out methods to reduce my grading time and to get them writing more. (Most recently, students wrote four drafts for a single essay and instead of grading each draft, I graded their overall process + metacognitive comments. More volume, less grading!)

I didn’t get to the portfolio at the end, and I was wisely advised to hold off on that. But I did use a new system of organizing student work in shared Google folders so that by the end of the year, they essentially did have a portfolio. They spent a couple days this week looking back over all their work to reflect on how far they’d come. Next year, I will have a better idea of how to lay the groundwork for a true portfolio project.

The good news is that I have a ton of experience to build on, plus a stack of teacher books to delve into, so that I can refine these wins and improve for next year. I have to fight my perfectionism in order to type this final line: I am proud of my progress.