Welcome and About Me

Hello and welcome from your child’s English teacher. For those of you in attendance at Back To School Night last week some of what I’m about to share will be a refresher. Speaking of Back To School Night, thank you for the great attendance!

My name is Matt Kaberline and this school year is my 19th year in education and 5th year at Freedom High School. In addition to teaching English at Freedom, I have also served as a teacher, college counselor, and coach at private high schools in DC and Maryland. Prior to working in secondary schools, I was a college admission officer. Those experiences have been very helpful when discussing college preparation and college application essays with high school students.

My own educational journey led me to earn an undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech and a masters degree from Emerson College. I am a parent to two and a half year old twin boys, which means I don’t have as much free time for reading as I’d like but when I do have that time I often enjoy reading poetry and nonfiction books in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, and James Clear.

One of my personal mottos (“Be who you are and be that well” – St. Francis de Sales) influences the classroom community I attempt to build with my students. It is a tremendous responsibility and honor to educate young people. I’m excited to help your child become the best reader, writer, thinker, collaborator, and community member that they can be this year!

Marking Period 1 Units and Lessons

In English 10 and English 10 Honors, students have begun the year with activities designed to create community, get to know each other, and review fundamental concepts and skills necessary to achieve success in English class and life beyond high school. Right about now you might be asking yourself, what are some of these fundamental concepts? Well, we’ve spent some class time on effective strategies for evaluating directions, working in groups, communicating with others, and reading different types of texts (fiction, non fiction, poetry). After completing the i-Ready reading assessment and a writing diagnostic assessment this week, we will turn our attention to our Marking Period 1 Units in both English 10 and English 10 Honors.

The Power of Communication is the first unit of the year in English 10. This unit includes George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm as the anchor text and it attempts to answer the essential question: why do words matter? In addition to delving into Animal Farm, we will read a variety of poems, speeches, essays, and stories that help us best understand the impact of words, communication, and literature in our everyday lives.

What is Human Nature and What Shapes it is the first unit of the year in English 10 Honors. With William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies as the anchor text, this unit introduces students to some quintessential philosophical ideas about human nature and examines some of humanity’s most enduring and challenging questions. In addition to the aforementioned novel, additional texts will include poems, short stories, essays, and the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. We have also taken steps to round out our unit with texts that reflection the value of kindness and trust as essential elements of the human experience.

Communication

My goal is to produce a blog post like this at the beginning of each quarter to recap what we have just covered and to preview what is coming up in the marking period ahead. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions. Email is the best way to reach me and I’m always glad to schedule a meeting if that would be helpful.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m excited to help your child become the best reader, writer, thinker, collaborator, and community member that they can be this year!