Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason has a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis on rhetoric and composition. She has more than a decade of teaching experience including six years as a college English professor. She has designed workshops and classes for elementary, middle, and high school students and is a homeschooling mom of two.

Her passions include pop culture, moral philosophy, essay writing, and reading skills. She designs classes that take a multi-disciplinary, integrated reading-writing approach to make sure learners have context and purpose for everything they create.

During her time as an English professor, Michelle specialized in teaching “developmental” writing, which means she was working with the students who had been deemed unprepared for college-level writing. In that work, she formed a teaching philosophy deeply centered on trust.

She believes that students learn best when they know that their instructor genuinely trusts them to do well. She works hard to avoid assignments and classroom dynamics that create antagonistic power structures. Instead, she wants learners to see her as a supportive guide who genuinely aims to help them reach their own goals.

Michelle is the founder of Dayla Learning, a place for “homeschooling the humanities with humanity,” and the co-founder of SEA Online Classes, a platform for hands-on, engaging online classes.

ELA sure is a beast, isn’t it? The American National Council of Teachers of English break it into these separate categories: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. Not only is that a huge category of its own, but ELA includes both reception of these texts and production of them. That means reading works of literature and analyzing their components is ELA but so is writing your own novel. That means public speaking is ELA but so is comparing speeches from famous moments in history. That means writing poetry is ELA but so is listening to the latest album of your favorite artist and looking for themes in the lyrics.

The beauty of ELA is in its vastness and variety, but that beauty can quickly become overwhelming when it comes time to make a transcript and feel like you’re giving your homeschooled learners the preparation they need for their post-high school goals.

In this presentation, Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason will go through some of the definitions and standards regarding high school ELA, give advice on transcript titling, and help demystify the work of untangling the mess to give you and your learners the confidence that you’ve got it under control!