Hello, everyone,

Let me introduce myself and the website that you have found! My name is Mr. Anthony Martinez, and I am an English Teacher at Curie high school in Chicago, Illinois. And if you are reading this, then there is a very good chance that you’re either enrolled in a class that I teach at Curie High School or the parent or guardian of a student who is enrolled in a class that I teach at Curie High School.

I have created this website for students and parents to keep up to date with the curriculum, lessons, assignments, and other classroom updates that pertain to the class in which you or your loved one are enrolled.

Throughout the year, the class that I teach will be using Google Classroom. Yet, throughout my time teaching, I have found that the format of Google Classroom can be a little overwhelming for students and teachers alike to use. At Curie, sometimes, we do have difficulty with attendance and high number of absences by students. Oftentimes, these students do attend class after a period of absence and seek to find out what they missed and how it can be made up.

It can be difficult to find exactly what you need as you stroll through the stream on Google Classroom, and even after just a few absences, it can be easy to become confused and overwhelmed as to where you should click and what you should do to connect our latest assignments together with our latest materials. In the past, students who may have been absent and in search of what they missed, have found parts of what they should make up and missed other parts. The goal and purpose of this website is to provide hopefully what will be a platform that is a little easier to follow and a little more straight forward.

More so, sometimes, students miss important classes where important skills instructions were taught. It can be very difficult again to find the opportunities to re-teach and re-deliver those skills based lessons to those students. My hope is that as we move along with our class, I will be able to provide you with videos that can help supplement some of that re-teaching, those missed lessons and that missed time. Hopefully, this will help you or your student still learn the skills needed to move forward in the class and successfully navigate the assignments that will need to be completed for the class.

Furthermore, in the classes that I teach, we occasionally engage with very dense and complicated material and literature. For instance, if you’re in English 3, we are reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. Later, we will be reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare. If you’re in English 1, we are currently reading through a series of short stories that are dense enough that we can only hope to scratch the surface of their meaning and historical, cultural, and literary significance. Many times in class, we will be focused on developing your reading skills and writing skills to prepare you for a college environment, and we will not have the time in class to engage as deeply with the material as I would like. Hopefully, with this website, I can at least begin to close that gap a little, and provide you with some deeper lecture, background information, and if we can find a way, maybe even deeper discussion and engagement.

So with that introduction, I say, Welcome! The website is still being put together, but feel free to click around and check back for updates soon. I look forward to seeing you all in class and at parent-teacher conferences!