Distance Learning

Hi Everyone, 

Happy Monday!

I hope you and your families are all well.

A lot of you are probably wondering what distance learning is going to look like for our classes.

First of all, don’t panic. I’m not going to ask you to do anything too difficult. I’ll be available to help you if you need me. And the district has decided that your grades can not go lower than what they were as of work submitted on 3/13 for any of your classes. (If you turned in work or took a test on 3/13 and the teacher graded it later that is part of your grade.)

From now until April 23rd I’m going to be helping with a lot of the training for district teachers, so my plan for you during those weeks is going to look a lot like what we did before spring break. I’ll use a slide deck on the blog to add a new activity for you each day.

We will not have regularly scheduled classes on Zoom or Meet. But I will set up “office hour” times when you can drop in to ask me questions beginning on 4/27. I will post a link to join the session in Google Classroom. If you need me at other times, or before 4/27, you can email me or send me a message on Remind. We can also arrange video conferences by appointment.

On 4/27 I will assign your first standards based project in Google Classroom. It will be based on a book you’ve read recently, so I wanted to tell you about it now. You will need a book that you have read or are reading. The book needs to be fiction and have some mystery or suspense. You will be analyzing how the author creates that suspense. Most books have a lot of suspense, so this doesn’t have to be a horror or murder mystery, just something where you the reader are waiting to find out how something turns out. You will need the physical book or an ebook because you will need to be able to use evidence from the text to support your analysis. Sorry, you won’t be able to use a book you don’t have any access to. So make sure you keep reading daily.

A few weeks later I’ll give you your second project. It will be about a famous or infamous person you want to know more about. You will need to read about them and do some other research, but you aren’t presenting a report about the person. Instead, your work will focus on an analysis of the way that person is presented in different media.

We will probably have a third project in May, but I want to see how you handle the first two before I tell you too much about it.

If your grade is high, these projects will give you practice with the kinds of skills you will need for 10th grade and beyond. If your grade is low, then these projects are a chance to show that you can become proficient with the expectations of 9th grade standards and raise your grade.

Distance learning is going to be an interesting challenge for all of us. Ms. Love, Ms. Dowd, and I are all here to help you. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the rest of the world, but in English class we are going to work together and it is going to be okay.

Wishing you all the best,

Mrs. R.



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