November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? Today’s featured reader is Jeremy Aldrich.

Name: Jeremy Aldrich
Location: Harrisonburg, Virginia
Occupation: Middle school (6-8) electives – French, Foreign Language Exploratory, and Global Citizenship
Blog: Global Citizenship in a Virtual World

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
I love the push to keep learning, to keep discovering new questions and to help students discover their own questions.

Tell me some things you loved about your favorite teacher(s)
My favorite teacher, Mr. Newton, helped me feel like I was a good writer. He inspired me to read and to think and to share. He wasn’t fake or shallow with his comments to students.

List some of your most effective classroom management strategies
The best classroom management strategy I have is a weekly routine. It starts the class out right and helps me include some of the bonus content that would get lost if I didn’t make sure to include it. Here’s our weekly routine for French class: on Monday we learn a quote, Tuesday we play a round robin game to use vocabulary in novel ways, Wednesday we journal, Thursday we experience authentic language (a guest speaker, song, or video), and Friday we recite the quote for the week.

Name (up to) three other blogs that you frequently visit/subscribe

• Dangerously Irrelevant
• Suffern Middle School In Second Life
  
• Bionic Teaching

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Joel Wagner

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.