I teach at a WITS after school program in Pasadena, a city that’s considered a suburb rather than a separate place because it is adjacent to the city limits.  One of my children, Adam, is autistic. It wasn’t obvious immediately, but eventually I noticed that Adam was different from the other children.
Despite whatever associations you [...]

The WITS Meeting House project unites creative writing with inspired drawing; hundreds of students, working with WITS teachers, created self-portraits, and 158 of them now reside on the Flickr site.

One portrait that I especially like was drawn and painted by a girl named Chelsey. It’s simple, yet striking: the hair is a sensible, realistic [...]

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or [...]

posted by Julian Martinez, Writers in the Schools

Even the best teacher can benefit from a refresher course. Patrick Winston, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at MIT, has made a video presentation on his teaching techniques here.
1) While Dr. Winston usually teaches college students, his ideas are also applicable to WITS classrooms as well. One idea he stresses is to [...]

When it’s time to write, some students confront a curious mental block. They understand that writing has practical applications, in addition to artistic ones; they understand that there are many forms and genres of writing, just as there are many different audiences for [...]

The 2008 presidential elections are fast approaching; candidates of every stripe and background are saturating the airwaves. If there was ever a time to broach issues of democracy in action in the classroom, this would be it. While teachers should not endorse any particular political position, the students are usually ready to volunteer ideas of [...]

I remember that the first book I actively sought out was The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker. It was originally released in 1986, when I was nine years old. I read the reviews in the newspaper when the book first came out and decided I had to have this book. It was one of the [...]

What is it like for a child to discover the wonder of the world?
When I was growing up, I lived in Florida in a little city called Lakeland about an hour outside of Tampa; I remember the first time I pressed driftwood between my toes, shook out sand from my hair and spotted a stingray [...]

A few years ago I saw an author speak an Houston. During her talk, she spoke about a friend of hers who had passed away. Her concern was moving; she didn’t need to memorialize her friend, yet she freely chose to honor her with her speech. However, her execution wasn’t perfect. If her testimonial had [...]