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….
Category: Activities
Classroom activities
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…
The Wordle Challenge
Paul at quoteflections tagged me on this one, and it has taken me a bit of time to get to it. I created the wordle last week hoping I would get to it – here it is: I use Wordle in my classroom to help make abstractions more concrete. My favorite way to do this…
Remember
I teach this senior elective on the autobiography and memoir. Right now we are reading a group of writers who always make me think: Lucy Grealy, David Sedaris, Anne Lamott, and Harvey Pekar. A wonderful assignment from last week was to write (after reading Sedaris’s “Twelve Moments in the Life of and Artist” from Me…
Life Long Kindergarten
Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with my American Literature class about playing with books. I told them that I had spent a day at the MIT media lab two summers ago, and I was impressed by Mitch Resnick and the folks there at the Media Lab because they had this great problem solving model:…
Monday Morning Journalism
This week at school there was one consistent conversation in the halls and classrooms on the 4th floor: underage drinking, facebook, and getting called out on it by a peer. Who was the “snitch” who printed out photographs from facebook and gave them to the dean? Why did they do it? What would happen? Could…
Feeling effective (finally)
It’s been a rocky start to the year, and the two projects that I’ve posted about have felt like rare moments of classroom work where we have connected as people and as learners together. I looked at that energy and tried to find a way to touch that each day. It’s been hard for some…
Little Moments Matter
When I got to school today, this photograph had been sent to the all school list-serv. It made my day: first, because the sentiment matched the act of creation itself, and if course, because of how it got there. My Autobiography and Memoir class read the narratives of Ben Franklin and Frederick Douglass. Both of…
The things we LIKE are complicit in the things we DON’T…
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…
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”). …
First Post
Today one of my poetry presenters did not show up, so we had some unplanned time. The amazing synchronicity of the following events led to a collaborative poem. Yesterday, one of my students brought us Jim Carroll, and his 8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain, and Carroll was in the company of Robert Frost and recent…
Living on the Lip of Insanity 