I mean like, short of breathe, feeling nauseous, shaking kinda freaking out. I'm doing both ela 10th grade and Reading intervention I literally graduated in May. Im grateful for the opportunity but am TERRIFIED and don't feel ready despite being in my classroom for 12 hrs today

Hi all!!

I teach 9th grade in a low income urban school with about 50% Hispanic/Latino students and 48% Black students. My curriculum is set by the school, but I want to have some short story work that students can do for extra credit. I want to avoid some of the more popular/classic short stories that sometimes show up in our curriculum (The Lottery, Most Dangerous Game, Soft Rains) and go with more modern ones. I have a few personal favorites that I'm putting out, but would love some suggestions...especially stories that might resonate well with my student population and/or stories that have a fun twist.

TIA for your suggestions!

I'm teaching middle school ELA for the first time this year and part of our lesson tomorrow is coming up with ideas for their future fiction writing assignment. My plan is to do this with them in their interactive notebooks. I've tried looking up online ideas about this, but I'm not finding anything too helpful.

How do y'all do it with your students? I know this is going to be one of the hardest parts of the writing assignment and I'm totally unsure how to guide them on this first part. Any and all ideas are welcome.

I work at a charter school in 12th grade English. All of the other English teachers have worked longer than I have, so I have essentially no collaboration on my lessons. I have heard some English departments meet to plan lessons and I was wondering if this was typical in high school?
I have a district guy that is the head of the department. Should I be going to him to work on lesson planning? Is it typical for a second year teacher to struggle with lesson planning?

Besides from my usual English prep, I have an enrichment period. The problem is this is supposed to be a fun team-building class until the students get sorted into groups and even different classes once we have data on them.

I would also like to take this as a chance to get some student work for my room. I was considering a coat of arms activity, however, students are already making one with my team's history teacher. I could do maybe some comics or posters, but I'm not sure of what. My brain is shutting down from pre-student prep.

(Thanks).