ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins teaching middle school English in the fall of 2004 at Lincoln Junior High School. She joined Lincoln as an aspect of the district's plan to respond to the school's changing demographics, which was to hire more bilingual staff and ESL-certified teachers and integrate ESL methods in mainstream classrooms. Lincoln educated the children from the neighborhood, who were mostly white, and children from neighboring elementary schools. The systems of progress were failing many students, and it seemed quite apparent that the categories of students failing were in two of No Child Left Behind subgroups: low income and English language learners. The Prentice Hall literature textbook included Goodrich and Hackett's dramatic adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank complete with lesson plans, which was a big help, but the publishers clearly had not anticipated this additional genocide unit in their standards-aligned, research-based textbook.
