teaching English

Today I finished a long-term substitute gig teaching Language Arts at Riverton High.  I enjoyed it but am actually glad to be done.

I had 2 Language Arts 12 classes.  Those are kind of bottom of the barrel because seniors who are really serious about school generally pick concurrent enrollment, AP, or college prep classes.  We were working on a argumentative research paper.  I liked most of my students but was completely surprised that about half of the class did basically nothing.   No effort at all.  That is out of my frame of reference.

I had 3 Language Arts 10 classes.  Two of them were great and one gave me grief.  Those classes were working on writing a nonfiction children's book.

My favorite class was a Creative Writing class.  They made me laugh every time!  We were doing a poetry unit.  I didn't know a lot about the type of poems I was supposed to so I had to do a lot of research/homework.  My favorite things were their daily journal entries.  I gave a journal prompt and they wrote a page.  They had to share what they wrote at least once a week.  Some of them were so funny and incredibly creative.

The hardest thing for me was deciding how many points assignments should be worth and then grading them.  Writing is so subjective.  Maybe that's why I liked the creative writing class.  I just gave them points for completing the assignments.

I'm now ready for a few days off.