ABSTRACT
For the next-to-last Friday Focus of the year, I called on Deborah Thornton to write on a topic of her own choosing. Deborah, one of our finest language arts teachers, came to the teaching profession later in life than most teachers at our school. Her classroom is one of the warmest and most inviting classrooms I have ever set foot in (the Friday Focus in Chapter 27 alludes to her various skills). In many ways, I consider Deborah a “traditional” teacher. For example, she is very adamant that all students conform to her very strict behavioral expectations. She also places a great amount of emphasis in her eighth grade language arts class on “old-fashioned” skills such as grammar (I’ve even known her to diagram sentences with her students!). She is also traditional, perhaps, in the fact that she currently lives and teaches in the same small city in which she was raised. On the other hand, I also consider Deborah to be one of our most innovative and open-minded teachers. Although she is a traditionalist in many ways, her use of music and soft lighting suggests another side of her as a teacher. More significantly, she had attended a workshop not long before this Friday Focus was written and returned to tell me that beginning in the fall she would be completely changing her approach to teaching, adopting a “workshop” approach to teaching both reading and writing.
