The Teacher Diaries

Early in my teaching career, I worked at a high school that made people gasp when I told them that I worked there. It was no big deal to me. I did not encounter many disciplinary issues at all. However, the majority of the students that I taught were not motivated to learn. Each one had their own story and I understood, but on this one occasion I was a bit fed up. I had been teaching them the structure of a persuasive essay for a few days and wanted them to write with a bit more command. I was teaching the counterargument. What I thought would be one lesson took several. With that said, on one particular night I was confused and frustrated about why my students were struggling so much to address the counterargument in their essay. At that point a light bulb went off. I decided to write a model for them to analyze (I found that the exemplars that I wrote for them helped a bit more than the exemplars found on the web because I wrote about topics that they could relate to, so that...