Building Test Confidence in Nervous Kids

I have a student who is 14 in the 7th grade. He's scoring below literate on all his tests. He won't even do work where we write an essay together and all he has to do is copy off the board. We were working on something and his friend was trying to help him (read--let him cheat).

I was in the process of reading and grading 11th grade essays on *Lord of the Flies*. One is really well written. Too well written. A student literally copied commentary from the New York Times Review of Books. (Hey, at least he was stealing from the best.) I confronted the stude

A couple of years ago I had a 15 year old student who couldn’t read, write, or do basic math. She wasn’t labeled special ed and would complete assignments by copying. At the end of the year I called her dad for an unrelated matter. He told me he wanted to get her tested for a lea

Naturally we started to think “oh, so maybe she just knows she’ll get the extra help so she really doesn’t have to do much”. So I started telling her “I saw your reading scores and I know you can spell “where” without my help”. Turns out on her reading test……SHE HAD A READER. Som

I teach 3rd grade, and there's a shy girl in my class who rarely speaks. She doesn't raise her hand, eats lunch alone, and only answers questions with nods or whispers. I've been trying to reach her through small gestures: leaving encouraging notes on her papers, asking about her

There is a NYTimes article that recently came out diving into the overall decline of people who read for fun. We are at 16% as of 2023. (“Fewer People Are Reading For Fun, Study Finds”) That’s sad enough, but I feel the most significant part of the article is the following sectio