See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden

….On the Hot Seat, Elden reveals how teachers have been reacting to her book and how her book avoids — nay, refutes — movie and book cliches that “make real teachers feel like failures.”

Click here to read the rest of this interview on Alexander Russo’s blog, This Week in Education.

Q: If you could change one thing about the way the teaching profession works, what would it be?

A: There’s a big push right now to run schools according to a business model and hold teachers and schools accountable for “results.” It’s probably well-intentioned, but the business model assumes that educated children are our product. The way it plays out is that test scores are the product, and we’re treating students like employees at test score factories. They’re missing out on a lot of the activities that made learning fun for us, and teachers are frustrated at being forced to teach in ways that fit neither our students’ learning styles nor our own personalities. Another unintended consequence is that accountability measures scare teachers away from the kids who need the most attention.

I’ll be presenting excerpts from the book at the Miami Book Fair International on Saturday, November 14.
Time: 10:30-11:30 AM
Place: Room 7128
Cost: Free

The Miami Book Fair International is held at:
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus
300 NE Second Ave.
Miami FL 33132

You can also read this related Q & A in the Miami Herald.

Hope to see you there.

Check out this feature on how to get kids to read despite distractions from technology. It was filmed in my classroom, and there are some great shots of my students looking interested and eager to read despite distractions from technology, which as we all know is EXACTLY what happens in class every day.

Click here to read the transcript and watch the video on wsvn.com.

Click here to view this video on Youtube. Most of it looks less awkward than this particular frame. I hope.

In the four years it took Hialeah High School teacher Roxanna Elden to publish her new book, See Me After Class, she received dozens of rejection letters, but where others might have found disappointment, she saw something more. Each letter, she noticed, was more detailed than the previous one. “No” became “maybe next time.” She collected all the letters in a packet and passed them out to students in her creative writing class to show them what writers have to go through.

“You have to know what progress looks like,” said Elden, 30, a language arts and creative writing instructor at Hialeah High since 2004. “Sometimes, it comes in the form of more personal rejection letters.” (click here to read this in the Miami Herald.)

Click here to watch my best interview ever. Also, to be fair, my first interview ever.

June 5, 2009, at 8pm
Books & Books
265 Aragon Ave
Coral Gables, FL 33134
Seating is limited, so you may want to arrive early.

Hope to see you there.

June 11, 2009 7:00 PM
Lincoln Park Borders
2817 North Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60657

Thursday, June 18 4:00 PM 
Prudential Center Barnes & Noble
800 Boylston Street Suite 179
Boston, MA 02199
617-247-6959