420: My 9th Grade Dream Curriculum (as I get an Unexpected Request)

About this episode

Betsy Potash discusses her vision for a ninth grade English course after receiving an unexpected teaching request.

Recently an invite dropped into my inbox - did I want to swing by a school in my city to talk about teaching ninth grade English for them next year? They really needed to fill a hole for a year. Just one hole - one course, one period, one group of kids. For one year. Did I want to do it? If I did, what was my vision for the course? Whew. Honestly, the flood of emotions about knocked me over. On the one hand - maybe I could act on the ideas I've spent all my working hours cultivating for the last decade. How I would love to design my room, my booklist, my units, using all the materials I've developed, and hopefully making a real impact in the lives of this class of students. On the other hand - the struggle. The school was already using a textbook to teach 9th grade English and I wanted nothing to do with it. I imagined total freedom to craft the course of my dreams, but of course, the school would already have arcs and norms in place. They might not want a vigilante substitute looking to repaint and refurnish her classroom with stacks of choice reading books while teaching podcasting and multimodal memoirs, hosting literary food truck festivals and one-pager fairs, and submitting…

People in this episode

Host: Betsy Potash

Topics covered

• curriculum design
• ninth grade English
• teaching strategies
• education
• course vision

Keywords

• ninth grade
• curriculum
• teaching
• English
• education
• course design
• Betsy Potash

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: New York Times

Places: ninth grade, school

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