Today Theresa and I spent the day with ten junior girls looking at images of women and girls in the media, particularly print media – those ubiquitous women’s and girls’ fashion and lifestyle magazines – and thinking about how destructive they are to us as people – men and women To Begin We started by…
Author: Kate Tabor
English teacher in a JK-12 school
Itchy Friday…
It’s Friday and I see my American Lit kids at 2:00 – for most of them it’s their last class of the week, and they admitted to thinking the day was already over (much to their chagrin “but it’s not that I don’t like your class Mrs. Tabor, it’s just been a really long week”). …
An open letter to the NCAA Clearinghouse
How dare you? How dare you say that Journalism is not a “real” English class? How dare you say that my curriculum is not rigorous? What do you know about the day to day challenges of the student journalist? What do you know about how hard they work to report and write stories? What do…
“All that is not my soul…”
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 3 End of day two of the 2008-2009 academic year. Yesterday almost proved too much for me. The Thursday schedule is brutal in the morning, and there was the added layer…
The American Scholar
In response to Clay Burell’s thought provoking post on the need to challenge the conventional wisdom and think critically about all things (even the tough stuff like religion – “When Corrupting the Youth is Good” – something that he wrote triggered that ghost of Emerson: And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs…
Mindset to begin the year
I love my friends. They teach me new stuff all the time. I’ve seen a bunch of old friends in the last week as the summer comes to a close. One very talented friend of mine (an actress) shared this bit of wisdom from Alfred Molina, her friend Fred. Mr. Molina was in Chicago for…
Be flexible…
After watching the 2008 Olympics, I have to say that I am happy that my girls are circus performers. In circus, when you slip a bit and recover, style, and smile, people APPLAUD!!! (No one deducts .10 of a point.) In circus, they assume that you will drop your juggling clubs, fall off the unicycle,…
Rehearsal, revision: preview, prehear?
Do we have a word for imagining what something will sound like? Beethoven, famously deaf, must have been able to imagine what his works sounded like without hearing them. Mozart? Saltzburgian lore suggests that he too heard compositions in his head before he committed them to paper. Jazz musicians must be able to imagine what…
Competition
What is it? That sinking feeling that I get when I am placed in competition with others, either real or implied. I was never very good at athletics. I can ice skate and ride a bike. Neither of these activities requires competition, except when I am riding with my husband and his handmade 20+ year…
Flowering from within
Well, thinking about poetry and teaching again, I looked at my class rosters and I realize that I have a couple of students who take a lot of my courses. One girl that I taught in seventh grade and again last year in American Literature is taking both of my senior electives next year and…
Spinning
I’m writing senior recommendations that serve as a cover letter for a student’s college application. I’ve got seven to write this year and it always feels like both a privilege and an insurmountable challenge. It’s so hard to describe these students in a way that will serve them well. I have found that it easier…
Writing and Revision – to Re-see
Thanks to Clay Burell for asking me to consider finishing this entry. As part of our Community Connections work this year we published an anthology of student writing. The anthology included the writing of every member (but one) of the junior class, and each student was asked to revise a piece of writing until their…
Living on the Lip of Insanity 