ENGLISH-ish
A Professional Learning Resource for English
Who we are
Two English teachers and long-time friends who have the great fortune of working side-by-side in the trenches of the ninth grade classroom.
Our mission is to build socially conscious ninth-grade writers who are prepared for rigorous academic writing.
Shannon and Nathan met on the first day of their first graduate class in 2009. Nathan struck up a conversation about possums and Shannon was just weird enough to be intrigued. They graduated with Master’s degrees from USC two years later, and now teach 9th grade in classrooms next door to each other at the same public high school in Columbia, South Carolina. Realizing that on top of sharing many personality quirks and philosophies, they also shared each other’s frustrations with the endless issues
plaguing a teacher of freshmen (or any student at any level, really), they developed a more formal professional relationship to start tackling some of these pesky teacher realities head-on. The result is a now years-long friendship and professional camaraderie that spawned this site and the projects you see here. Our current issue of choice is 9th grade writing. Stay tuned for when we embark on the next . . . .