The Chalk & Carbon — Issue No. 47

A note, ditto-fresh.

Dear colleagues — this term we found ourselves returning, again, to the stubborn question of attention: who gives it, who is permitted to lose it, and what we owe to the small, slow noticings that classroom life asks of us.

"Teaching is research conducted under fluorescent light, with a bell, in front of an audience."

— Editorial board, March '24

Inside, you will find Maren's longitudinal notes on phonics-as-conversation, a dispatch from the Brookfield middle school maths corridor, and a worksheet on tessellations that one of our fifth-year teachers swears is the best forty minutes she runs all year.

As always: we mimeographed this. Smudges are free of charge.

— Ines & Theo

co-editors · the collective

What's inside →

01.Phonics as Conversation: a five-year notebookp. 04

Maren Okafor · Glenhill Lower

02.The Brookfield Maths Corridor Experimentp. 11

D. Patel & the Year 7 team · Brookfield Middle

03.On the small dignity of the morning meetingp. 18

Júlia Santos · Riverbend K–8

04.Practitioner Voices: nineteen short reflectionsp. 22

From across the network

05.Resources: tessellations, weather logs, a sonnet kitp. 28

Print-ready · standard A4 / US Letter

06.Archive: every issue since 1978p. 34

Organised by school year

Pinned

Submissions for Issue 48 close April 30. Send us your worksheets, your screw-ups, your favourite ten minutes.

Feature· 14 min read· Article 01

A primary classroom with low tables and children's work on the walls

Phonics as conversation.

A five-year notebook from the lower-school corridor at Glenhill.

What if the smallest unit of reading instruction isn't the phoneme, but the exchange? Across two cohorts and 184 logged morning sessions, Maren Okafor traced what happened when she stopped quizzing and started asking — and let the seven-year-olds ask back. The results, modest and stubborn, are documented in pencil, in margin, and (occasionally) in juice.

Maren Okafor · Glenhill Lower · Grade 2

Read the article →

Article 02 · Maths

Students working through a maths problem at a table

Brookfield's corridor experiment.

Seven teachers, one hallway, and a year of letting Year 7 redraw the problem before solving it.

D. Patel · Brookfield Middle · Year 7

Article 03 · Community

The small dignity of the morning meeting.

Why Júlia Santos abolished the calendar song and started reading the local paper aloud instead. (Mostly the obituaries. It's better than you'd think.)

Júlia Santos · Riverbend K–8 · Grade 4

→

Section One

04 articles, this issue.

pp. 04 — 21 · Hover to read

Article 04 · Longread · Network-wide

What we mean when we say 'rigour'.

Six headteachers, three department chairs, and a janitor (who insisted) sit down to redefine a word that has been used against teachers more often than it has helped them. A roundtable, lightly edited. Light snacks were served.

22 min read · Compiled by The Editorial Board

Open article →

Practitioner voices.

Short reflections from teachers across the network. Cut out and pinned, mostly without permission, to the editorial board's corkboard.

"I taught the same lesson on light reflection for nine years before a kindergartener pointed out that puddles do it too. I have not recovered."

Anya WhitmoreGreenwood Primary · Grade 1

The single best classroom-management move I learned this year was lowering my voice to a whisper when the room got loud. The single worst was buying a small bell. Burn the bell.

Theo MarchettiBrookfield Middle · Year 8 · ELA

"Wait time is the only pedagogical intervention I have ever met that costs nothing and works every time."

Priya RamaswamyHollis Heights · Grade 6 · Science

We rearranged the desks into a horseshoe in October. By December, two students who had never spoken to each other were collaborating on a comic about parliamentary procedure. I'm not saying the desks did it. But I'm not saying they didn't.

Marcus DoyleGlenhill Upper · Year 10 · Civics

"Stop assigning poetry on Fridays. Friday is for prose. Tuesday is the poetry day. I will not be elaborating."

Esi BoatengRiverbend K–8 · Grade 5

A student asked me, last week, whether I thought she was smart. I said yes. She said: how do you know? And I realised I had been telling her so for seven months without ever explaining what I had seen her do. I have started writing it down.

Hana LindqvistNorthvale Community · Grade 3

"Sub plans are a form of literature. I will die on this hill."

Devon ParkBrookfield Middle · Year 7

I asked them to define 'fair' on the first day. We are still revising the definition. It is March.

Iris ChoWestbrook Academy · Grade 9 · Ethics

"The lesson plan I have rewritten the most times is the one on long division. The lesson I am proudest of, I never wrote down at all."

Beatrice OlafssonGreenwood Primary · Grade 4 · Maths

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