Last night’s gathering at our home and a comment about fireflies from Michael Doyle over at Science Teacher put some pieces together for me this morning. Hosting Last evening we hosted a welcome potluck for the students from Japan that are visiting my daughter’s school and their host families. We had twenty families and their…
Author: Kate Tabor
English teacher in a JK-12 school
Not your America or my America, but…
Our America LeAlan Jones, who with David Isay and Lloyd Newman produced the astonishing Ghetto 101 and Remorse documentaries for NPR, spoke today at school to the 3-12th grades. The most important thing he had to say to all of us was that he doesn’t think less of the students here because of their privilege,…
If I had a theme song
I have a little music supervisor in my head that plays music while I read books. The first book I really remember this happening for was The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the album Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens played in my room and my head, and to this day I hear…
Bone tired
Thursday and Friday of this past week we went on the Junior Class retreat. We take our class into the city, stay at a hostel, eat pot-luck, and work on social justice issues. Along the way we try to learn a little bit about each other and begin to appreciate the “others” that are both…
My Super Self
We are reading WATCHMEN by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and after reading about how the characters constructed their masked persona, I asked the class to create their own Super Self. We allowed them to give themselves a super power (unlike MOST of the characters in Watchmen), and we created our super selves. Here is…
Meme Mash Up: 7 things and Music
Seven things You Might Not Know About My (Musical) Taste Clay Burell, was tagged for the Seven Things You Might Not Know About Me meme – but felt he had “been there/done that” with an Eight Things meme not too long back. So, he “fiddl[ed] with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring” (he really…
Neverwhere
I’m teaching a class on the Science Fiction/Fantasy novel. I’m really just acting as placeholder teacher this year. Even though this is a genre I love, I won’t ever teach it again because it is not a class I created and because I am returning to the middle school next year to teach 7th grade….
Texts for Today
Today we are all looking at the words of Abraham Lincoln, born 200 years ago today. We also celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, another man whose works continue to shake society. That must have been an amazing planetary alignment the day these men were born. At school today we were…
The Land of Arrested Development
My room has become the haven for boys so intensely geeky, so not self aware of their own stereotypicalness that they make me laugh every day. Right now this is what is happening: Someone’s iPod is plugged into my speakers playing a mix of Yngwie Malmstein, Matchbox Twenty, and the Mai ai Hee guy (O-zone)…
Facebook (breathe)
My niece is a wonderful woman. She lives in Florida with her husband and children, and her best friend from high school is her brother-in-law. My niece has stared down a lot of demons in her life, but lately they have come thick and fast. In the past two weeks she lost a childhood friend…
Cinema Hat Trick
Three films that I try to find a way to use every year. I was a film student at Northwestern back in the days of the feminist film aesthetic of the late 70s. What I discovered then (along with the fact that I can fall asleep watching a film in a minute) is that are…
Something About Daisy
Yesterday I had the very best discussion of Daisy Miller, the novella by Henry James, that I have ever had with a class of juniors. I have had this book on my reading list six times, and it was this year that the discussion was lively, honest, funny, and unlimited. Why? I can think of…
Living on the Lip of Insanity 