teaching Archives - Leslie Auman

July 28, 2019

Back to School Activities for Teachers

Dare I say it? *whispers* It’s almost time to go back to school! 😬 Please don’t hurt me; you know it’s here. Alas, summer break is coming to an end, and stores everywhere are reminding us that kids and teachers alike will be heading back to their schools over the next several weeks. While I’m no longer in the classroom and am therefore missing out on this annual fun fest that is going back to school, I do have a couple of engaging back to school activities for teachers from when I was still in the classroom a few years ago.

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August 8, 2018

42 Ways to Amplify Student Voices in the Classroom

Happy back-to-school season, teacher friends! Somehow 2018 is positively flying by, and it’s already time to prepare to head back into the classroom (if you’re not already back in it)! Recently, Teachers Pay Teachers hosted their annual back-to-school site-wide sale, and I ran a giveaway during that time to gift three teachers with TpT gift cards. My prompt on the giveaway post asked teachers to share how they plan to amplify student voices in the classroom this year, and I received some really awesome responses that I wanted to share with you in this blog post. Keep reading to get ideas for how to make sure your students get time to talk — and to be heard — in your class this school year.

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April 6, 2018

8 Reasons Why I Think I Failed as a Teacher

Hi, I’m Leslie. I used to be a middle school teacher. I quit after only three years of full-time teaching, and I haven’t returned. Even though I’m coming up on my three-year anniversary of when I left my teaching career, this is something about which I still feel embarrassment and, for some reason, shame. Teaching is a hard profession, and the term “hard” is multifaceted here. One of the reasons it’s hard is that, here in the U.S., the general social expectation is that teachers will give up everything to teach kids for laughably low salaries and be happy about it. So…when someone like me comes along and realizes that it’s just all too much and decides to leave…there’s a kind of judgment. This post is all about why I think I failed as a teacher and why it’s still hard for me to talk about.

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March 18, 2018

Teaching Wonder in 6th Grade

If you’ve been a human in the last several years, then you’re aware of the knockout, well-loved novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio. The book was first published in 2012, and I was in the second half of my M.Ed. program at that time. It just so happened that there were a few of us from my cohort all placed at the same middle school, with four of us actually on the same 6th grade team (and one more on the other 6th grade team). While I was in the social studies classroom on that team, one of my peers was in the ELA classroom, and she taught Wonder to our students that spring, when it was brand-spanking-new.

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Back to School Activities for Teachers

42 Ways to Amplify Student Voices in the Classroom

8 Reasons Why I Think I Failed as a Teacher

Teaching Wonder in 6th Grade

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