Welcome to the 8th-Grade 

 This year I will be using CANVAS for most of our work throughout the week.
To access CANVAS go to your RAPIDIdentity app on your iPad, login, and choose the canvas app. Logging in to CANVAS through RAPIDIdentity automatically logs you in.
Otherwise, the rest of this website will be just for information about me and the class syllabus. Over time I may expand this website to involve some weekly reflections and student work. Keep checking in for new content throughout the year!

What is English Language Arts?

 As Fry shares with us in the above meme, nothing is clear in English Language Arts. ELA takes a critical mind that is willing to question everything about a piece of literature, an article from an online journal, and the world around them. Because of its unclear nature, it is not an easy task to define English Language Arts. But I am going to try.
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I believe that ELA is an awful lot like skateboarding. It takes creativity, a belief in yourself, trust in your community, and a whole lot of risk. Now, the risk in ELA is much different than the risk in skateboarding--I'm not asking students to kickflip a twelve stair--but it can be just as scary. To put your thoughts out into the world, to write passionately, often about something you may not fully understand, and to then ask someone you barely know "What do you think of this?" can be terrifying to even the strongest of us. That is why building a collaborative and supportive community of peers is essential in this process of growth and success. Much like the community surrounding skateboarding, we push each other to gain those skills, we offer advice, we take that advice, and we celebrate each other's victories. 
There's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it, and better than that ... there is this beauty in dropping it into a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed, and seeing younger, more talented people take it to levels you can never imagine.
-Rodney Mullen
Skateboarding Legend

So on we fight, work, write our way to the top. We build those bridges to the center of our goals with the broken pieces of our defeats. Our defeats  make our loads lighter, our progress quicker. And once we reach that center, stepping on past mistakes, making new ones only so we can better support the weight of our learned knowledge, we can sing and dance and write and laugh and be, together.