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If you are a teacher, you know how many hours a week you spend searching for materials to make your lessons engaging. Those hours can really add up. Thousands of websites out there offer excellent teaching resources for middle and high school English teachers but you also have to weed through a lot of repetition and junk. It's time wasted in an already packed schedule.
Stop searching. This site picks through the best of what's out there and houses tons of resources and lessons, all FREE. We also create materials designed to engage students and provide efficiency for teachers. And this is just part of our organization's programs designed to make the life of the English teacher much easier.
In addition to the website, every week The Weekday Connection Newsletter delivers a relevant and time-saving lesson or resource for middle and high school English classes. To start receiving this FREE NEWSLETTER sign up in the box in the upper left.
One of the truly unique aspects of this organization is the Premium Membership. If you find you just never have enough hours in the day, then Premium Membership is for you. As former high school English teachers, our main goals are to provide relevant and practical material while saving you time. Premium Membership provides teachers with an online personal assistant to do all those things that suck the time away from teaching. Need a powerpoint made? Simply send in a request. Want to find some new materials for a novel you are teaching? Just email us.
We also provide workshops, ongoing professional development, personlized assistance and student programs that engage our most reluctant learners. Click here to read more about the programs we offer. This summer we will host our first of what will be an annual GET INSPIRED SYMPOSIUM. A week of workshops, presentations, and collaboration FREE for 500 teachers. You don't want to miss the amazing opportunities at this event.
The English Teacher's Friend is here to help so you can get back to what's important--teaching.
This Week's Lesson: Students as Teachers
A few weeks ago we decided to end the year with the students teaching the classes. For timing reasons, I let them work in pairs. I gave them the standards and a few handouts (see below) to guide them. The idea: make learning fun. Engage us with your material. You know what your peers like, find something that will make learning to read, write, intepret, think...easier.
They were of course excited and started thinking of all these things they were going to do. But I had to keep reeling them in. Most of them went straight to creating powerpoints with accompanying questions.
ME: "Okay. Think about this...do you like watching powerpoints and having someone read to you everyday?"
THEM: "No. Duh?"
ME: "Then....?"
THEM: "But Miss, it's easy..."
ME: "And what are they learning?"
It was enlightening to me how much they did not understand this concept. Many of them are realizing just how hard this "teaching" thing is. I work with them as a guide and I keep reiterating--but what are we learning?
They have done some homework--I'll give them that. They have high-interest topics (bullying, war crimes, political ads) but I still have to remind them--"Look at the standards. Does it say anything about date rape? It says students need to determine author's point of view and purpose,demonstrate command of conventions, write arguments that support claims. We can do all of this through learning about date rape, but you have to be creative and find ways to make that happen."
Tomorrow is the big day--the presentations begin. I have already asked two of the pairs if they would be willing to attend the Symposium and share their lessons with teachers. They looked scared but also flattered. I think you might be pleasantly surprised by what they created. Hopefully the presentation lives up to the materials and lessons they have created.
I won't be coming back to the classroom next year, (more on this next week) but if I were, I would really consider making this a start-of-the-year assignment rather than one for the end of the year. Might work as a nice overview for the skills that will be covered. And besides, why save Teacher Appreciation for the end of the year? Walking in someone else's shoes is a powerful thing.
Collection of Sites for Students to use for planning their presentations
Presentation Guidelines and Peer Evaluation
The new contests for the Spring offer a wide range of writing tasks from humor essays to playwriting.
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The English Teacher's Friend produces engaging and relevant materials for use in the secondary English classroom. These lessons are designed to save you time while being highly engaging for today's student. Several popular workshops will show you how to use these resources to their full potential. Tamara's workshops receive rave reviews and are extremely affordable. Follow up for implementation is a key element of success in these workshops so this does not become yet another workshop that gets put on the shelf to think about later. Immediate impact on students and a new level of engagement evolves right away. See the 
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created this site. The demands on teachers, especially English teachers, continue to rise while the time we are provided for teaching dwindles. We are forced to do more work after hours if we want to have truly engaging classrooms which means finding the latest articles and current events, videos and materials to bring to our students. To read about and explore new ideas for teaching, to search through the vast materials available to us, is almost a full time job itself. In fact, it is what I do for 20-30 hours each week. 
