Summer is over and it’s time to start eighth grade! You’re finally the top dogs at Hughes, and it’s time to step into the leadership roles that you’ve known you could fulfill.

This year, you’ll have the privilege of having the finest male English teacher on the eighth grade hall. It’ll be an adventure, but there are a few things I can promise you right from the beginning.

1. I will always be respectful to you. As human beings, we all deserve each others’ mutual respect. It’s not something you “earn.” It is something you can lose, however.
2. I will try to be fair with all students all the time. There will be times that I make a decision that I know, at that very moment, is unfair. I will keep those situations to a minimum.
3. I will do my best to make things interesting, even the grammar. As one of my colleges professors said, I will take responsibility for exactly fifty percent of the boredom in the room at any given moment. The other fifty percent is your responsibility: be engaged; do your best; don’t be afraid to try (and even fail) — do these things and we’ll have a great class.
4. I will give you as much choice in your learning as possible. Students who have options are students who are engaged. There are many topics that the state of South Carolina requires me to teach you, but even in that, there’s a lot of room for choice.
5. I will make mistakes. I am human, and I’ll mess up. You’ll do the same. If we’re calm, we’ll get through those mistakes just fine. In fact, they’ll be learning experiences, for me and you.
6. I will try to make you laugh during every class. I love joking around. I love being silly. And I love hearing my students laugh. It’s a sign of a good classroom atmosphere.
7. I will not interrupt you when you’re talking, or talk to others while you’re talking. There is an exception: if you’re taking learning time from other students, I’ll interrupt.

What about the class, though? I promised “interesting” and “choice” and “fair,” but what will we be learning. A look at the syllabus will give you a detailed overview of what we’ll be working on; a glance at the calendar will give you an idea of when we’ll be working on what. The topics include:

• the memoir form;
• poetry;
• grammar (with a special parts of speech review);
• Walter Dean Myers’ Monster;
• Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing for eighth grade; Romeo and Juliet for English I);
• persuasive writing; and,
• many, many, many pages of reading and writing.

This year, I will also be experimenting.

1. We will be doing a great deal of self-assessment. This means that not only will you decide how well you did on certain aspects of a given project but also you’ll be the one who framed and planned the project! In other words, you’ll be creating rubrics as well as evaluating your work using rubrics.
2. We will be working to improve our organizational skills through a system of collaborative indexing, we might call it.
3. We will be integrating our reading and writing so that what we’re reading serves as a model for what we happen to be writing at the time.

I’m excited about this year, and I’m looking forward to 180 days of joyful learning.