Objective: Students will create a usable resume using templates and their own experiences in preparation for the job market.

I harp on my students to make resumes. I require it as part of my summer reading assignment.  When students whine about needing to get a job, I ask if they have one.  I have a line of students around the hallway who tell me they got a job because of the resume they made in my class.  Many college applications and scholarships require students to have a resume.  Since I teach juniors, I make sure to spend a chunk of time near the end of school putting together resumes.

They use the Google Templates within the slideshow as a base and add their own information.  I edit it with them, since many have never seen a resume before. We talk about the reasons you should have one...even if you think you won't.  A high school kid who applies with a resume - even if the job doesn't call for one - is way more likely to get the job than one who doesn't have one.  For some it's a wake-up call; they tell me that they actually don't do anything except go to school.  When they see the resumes of some of their peers - with whom they are competing for college slots, summer jobs, and local scholarships - it jars them into getting involved.  Overall I believe teaching resumes is an essential component of my class.   

I've always wanted to try Literature Circles in my English classes, and this year I finally got to test them out.  I used this resource I found online as my guide, although I think I will tweak for next year.

I strongly believe that the best way to encourage kids to enjoy reading is by giving them more control over what they read.  I attended a really great professional development session last fall where a few of our middle school teachers discussed YA literature and the greatest difficulty for secondary English teachers - appealing to the boys.  So much of YA literature is geared towards girls, since they read at higher rates.  I wanted to find enough choices for literature circles to encourage my more reluctant readers to get excited.  I am hampered in my quest, however, by the availability of books in our English department book room.  Since I was also sharing books with the other junior English teacher, we had to find enough books to offer a variety to our nearly 200 students, as well as make sure we chose books that we were already familiar with (students are unimpressed when I assign them something I haven't also read).  I gave each class the options and let them list their preferences, then assigned them novels and groups based on that.  Most students got their first choice.  The following is the list of books I selected and my rationale for choosing them, as well as the reception of the students.

This year our English department got two sets of books that I'm very excited about: "Vocabulary for the High School Student" and "Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student" (Levine).  The idea is that the freshmen and sophomore teachers work their way through the one for high schoolers, and the junior and senior teachers each take parts of the college-bound one.  Ideally by the end of high school most students will have dug through all the words in this extensive unit.  They are divided in such a way that students are not learning words by rote memorization, but instead learning processes to decipher words - processes like context clues, Greek and Latin roots, and related words.  The exercises in the book require students to draw on more than just one spelling of one word; they use antonyms, synonyms, and extended thinking.  While we've discovered we could teach an entire year-long class over the book, the material is excellent once we've figured out a way of incorporating it.

DAY ONE
This past month I began the chapter on Greek roots with all my English classes that will continue through April.  In order to add a 'hook' to starting the chapter on Greek roots, I began the first class asking for volunteers.  A student would raise her hand, and I'd turn to the smart board and write her name using the Greek alphabet.  I'd ask for another volunteer, and then write that student's name on the board in Greek. They started to catch on and get really excited: "Do mine! Do Sarah!  Do Ethan!"  I then passed out copies of the Greek alphabet for them to paste in their notebooks.  We talked about how there is no J or F or Y, and they marveled over the different letters.  I took one semester of Biblical Greek at my parochial high school, which is now coming in handy as I recall using the Greek alphabet.  My students are very impressed at my miniscule amount of knowledge.  I then assigned the first word and exercise.