Teacher Post: The Benefits of Building a Blanket Fort

Gonna drop some teacher tips on you guys today! So your class is clipping along at a pretty good rate and your students are pickin' up what you're puttin down every lesson. You're blitzing through curriculum faster than you could have expected because A) you're probably a better teacher than you give yourself credit for and B) your students are geniuses who were created in laboratories. Now's the time to stop and smell the roses, but how do you do it? Sometimes it's as simple as reading stories or playing their favorite games for half an hour, but sometimes you gotta go big. You gotta build a blanket fort.

My second-in-command Callie Mattox and I finishing the Blanket Fort. The students had all jumped inside already.

Blog-O-Ween! A Reflection On My Teaching Style

Wednesday night was my final class before Halloween and I tried something new. Usually my pre-Halloween class is a hectic jaunt around whatever building we happen to be in. I recruit two or three friends to play characters and I have them lead us on a chase around the building dropping candy wherever they go. It is stressful and exhausting and almost always not planned thoroughly enough. I also worry how parents will feel when my costumed friends inevitably give their children floor-candy. This year I did away with all the hubub, and I think it was a real sign of growth for me as a teacher.

Blog-O-Ween! Just do it!

Getting your students interested and involved in class can be difficult. If you're anything like me, you are always incredibly into the theory of what you're teaching and you want your class to be able to appreciate the beautiful mechanics of what they're about to do. While it's great to be so excited about how stuff works, sometimes it's better just to let it work before explaining it. In theatre and in improv it is important to let your students get to creating in a safe environment quickly before even thinking about sharing theory with them. So quit mucking around with vocabulary words in your theatre class and just do it!

Blog-O-Ween! A Teaching Horror Story

This comes from my Summer teaching at Lexington Children's Theater back in 2010. I had never taught before that Summer and it was also my first professional internship. We had cleared our way through six out of ten weeks of classes when disaster finally struck. The only way we could survive was quick thinking and powerfully efficient teamwork.

Important Lessons From Teaching Young People

Teaching is hard. Teaching young people is harder. Of course teaching your lesson is important, but it's also what you're specifically trained to do. If you want your class to actually be successful, you're gonna have to do more than just communicate the material. Here's what's important in a class for young people (though I'm sure many lessons can be translated into teaching older students).