- If you teach

… you may be interested in this short article, written by me and friend & colleague Lowry Pei and published this week in Tomorrow’s Professor.  It’s on ways to use informal writing and peer response in any class you teach, in any discipline.
Excerpt, “Ways to Teach Peer Writing and Response“:
Writing’s role in critical thinking and [...]

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- Rights

On a “Bill of Rights,” collaboratively written by elementary school students in our neighborhood afterschool program, I spotted this item, which is my favorite on the list:

We have a right to be helpful and be helped.

Imagine, the same person, child or adult, could be both helper and helpee. Maybe even on the same day. [...]

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- Power tool

A few weeks ago, Eli came across instructions online for making his own messenger bag out of fused plastic bags. He e-mailed it to me and asked if we could make one. In the past few days, we did.
An absolute novice, he approached the sewing machine tentatively yet was open to advice [...]

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- Hanging drop

Until I looked at Laura Splan’s watercolors in blood, I hadn’t thought of my own blood as paint or ink. Yet, it is. Many times a day I prick my finger, squeeze a drop of blood from it, and touch the drop to a test strip inserted into a glucose meter. After I’m done with [...]

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- This one goes to eleven.

At the end of the spring ‘07 semester, my friend and colleague Lowry Pei and I were catching up and talking about some habits that should be basics for writing teachers. The next day Lowry suggested, by e-mail, that we generate a list. We opened a new Google document and became more purposeful. Our motivating [...]

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