The students I'm working with, overall, have either lost or never developed two big ticket items - an appreciation for the reading process and appreciation for the writing process. And developing appreciation for those things now as 11th-grade students is very challenging. In our efforts to educate our kids, I think too many times we teachers focus on "our stuff" and forget about the "big stuff". Maybe we don't think there is time to just read or just write, or maybe we never ourselves developed an appreciation for reading and/or writing.
I've said for my entire career, that I wonder how much I could improve performance scores if all we did in class was read and write. And as I've aged, that's pretty much what I find myself doing with my lesson plans - focusing my efforts on students consistently reading and writing and trying my best to foster an interest in those two big ticket things.
It's a battle I've waged my entire career, and my energy level seems to drop each and every year. I'm trying...I'm really trying.
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