Nothing has been normal since the pandemic hit schools last spring. The current back-to-school climate has produced an unprecedented anxiety in all educational stakeholders, returning our gaze to how CoVID is further exacerbating the ‘achievement gap’ between well-resourced and the working class families.

Let’s put an end to linguistic discrimination in the classroom. My goal in writing these blog posts (see my previous post on the problem with ALM-ers) is to bring an applied linguistics lens to some of the cultural issues we face in modern American society, often with a focus on education.

In America, black lives do NOT matter as much as white lives do. Full stop. Black Lives Matter is a simple and eloquent sentence comprised of an adjective (black) that modifies a noun (lives) and concludes with a verb (matter). What’s implied (e.g. explicitly missing) from the sentence is the rest of the predicate:

The Planning of a Juicy Sentence // Before we get to the transcript, it’s helpful to know what Ms. Sosa’s lesson plan looks like. She had to analyze the juicy sentence on her own in order to prompt her students through the discussion…

Learn about how to center language in your teaching practice with this teacher practice brief about the juicy sentence protocol.