Roxanna Elden's Blog, page 9
March 19, 2020
A Teacher’s Guide to Reluctantly Homeschooling Your Kids
Im often disappointed at how little my teaching experience prepared me for parenting. Eleven years in front of the classroom has done nothing for my skills at managing supermarket tantrums, getting a toddler to finish a yogurt in less than two hours, or reliably getting dirty clothes placed into the hamper. So now, as school... Read more
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March 6, 2020
Why I requested Roxana Ortega, who narrated “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” as the audiobook reader for “Adequate Yearly Progress.”
One of the habits I developed while writing and revising Adequate Yearly Progress was listening to specific sections of a few favorite audiobooks before sitting down to write. With a professional narrator’s voice in my head, unnecessary words or unclear phrasing became obvious. I could hear the poetic potential in lines that once seemed straightforward.... Read more »
February 18, 2020
My 5-Part Washington Post Series on “The Stories We Tell About Teaching”
To celebrate the Simon & Schuster re-release of Adequate Yearly Progress, I pulled together some themes I’ve been thinking & speaking about for years as a 5-part series for the Washington Post. Each of these, in its own way, relates to the stories we tell about teaching. Is the Image of the Great Teacher the... Read more »
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December 4, 2019
Nominate-a-Friend Holiday Giveaway!
Do you know someone who deserves a free copy of ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS: A NOVEL? Atria Books is running a nominate-a-friend giveaway for the holidays! If you win, your friend will receive a free copy of the new version of the novel, a month ahead of its official release date. (And, of course, they’ll love... Read more »
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October 7, 2019
Make Me or Break Me: A Poem for First-Year Teachers
Has anyone told you yet that the first year of teaching will make you or break you? People love repeating this sound bite. It rhymes, it’s clever-and, it’s absolutely terrifying. Luckily, it’s also not that true. A truer (and more useful) statement is this: Almost all new teachers have days when they think they are being... Read more »
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August 5, 2019
An Alternative to Reading Your Own Writing Out Loud When It’s Time to Revise (Plus, Some of My Favorite Audiobook Narrators)
One piece of common writing advice is to read your writing out loud to see how it sounds. For me, a more helpful way to get a sense of the “sound” of a piece of writing is to spend a few minutes listening to an audiobook that’s both well written AND has an amazing narrator.... Read more »
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August 1, 2019
Teaching High School English Taught Me to Read Like A Writer. Here’s the Biggest Trick I Learned.
It’s a well-known, well-worn word of writing-world advice – almost a cliche at this point: The best writers are readers. This is true, of course. Without more context, though, it’s not specific enough to be useful. A decade of teaching high school English taught me a more workable version of this. The best writers don’t... Read more »
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July 24, 2019
Five Luxuriously Literary Lists from Popular Books (And How to Write Your Own)
You don’t always know when you’re reading a list. Sometimes, you just notice you’re reading something wonderful, which means – if you’re me – you highlight the passage, not quite sure what you’re going to do with it, just sure you want to be able to find it again. Then one day, while planning a... Read more »
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July 23, 2019
Six Quotes that Will Change the Way You Look at Familiar Words (Plus, a Writing Prompt)
Sometimes all it takes is a few lines of writing to change the way you think of a familiar word. The quotes below use well-word vocabulary words with such original definitions, contexts, or explanations that you may never see the words in quite the same way again. Will you jealously wish you had written the... Read more »
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July 22, 2019
Thoughts on Writing: Who is the Eye Behind the Microscope? (Or: Who is the “I” Behind the Microscope?)
The title of a writing workshop I recently taught was Microscope Vs. Telescope. As a writer or reader, you can think of description as a lens focused on a topic. And the topic – who or what the story is about – is usually obvious. A masterful writer, though, makes us think not only about... Read more »
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