Last night was the annual curriculum night, and I went off book a bit. I didn’t use my three minutes to tell the parents what I teach; they have the curriculum guide for that. I used it to defend reading. So here goes: A recent study from Emory University titled “Short- and Long-Term Effects of…
Category: Books for class
Thoughts about the assigned texts for my classes
Trying Something New With Something Old
My seventh grade class is studying Romeo and Juliet, and we are reading the play aloud in class. This allows me to preview scenes, stop and start to think about what is happening, attitudes, emotions, word play, allusions…. but there is no homework involved with this. I want them to come away with an appreciation…
My year with iPads – part 3
Blogging and the Daily Edit Two on-going assignments in seventh grade are the independent reading blog and the Daily Edit. I have this crazy idea that if I wants kids to value reading and to find books that they like, I need to make room in my curriculum for independent reading. So every other Monday…
My year with iPads – part 2
With Romeo and Juliet, we went pretty iPad lite. I had introduced GoodReader, so I did email a PDF synopsis of each act as we went along. We read the play in class, and yes, I know we could use an e-text of the play, and I may do that, but the Folger Library edition…
Warrant, rapier, nuptial – words in class
This week we were still reading Romeo and Juliet. I don’t really want my students to go home and try and read it themselves (would like them to not get completely frustrated), so I decided to look at vocabulary – words that might still be in every day use but that they might not know….
Trust Your Ideas
“I’m worried. Can you read this?” As a measure of how little students trust themselves and their ideas, this is the question that I got today from a thoughtful student. This summer I wrote about fear in the seventh grade classroom. Yesterday I heard that fear in the room, I heard my voice rising in…
You Never Can Tell With Bees…
When I prepared to spend the week at Mansfield College talking about Shakespeare in history, I hadn’t really thought too much about Edward Bear, also known as Winnie the Pooh. I love Pooh. The A. A. Milne stories have been favorites of mine as a child, as a parent and as a teacher. Milne’s poetry…
What’s the Use of Stories…
“What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” That’s the terrible question asked by Haroun of his father, Rashid Kalifah the storyteller in the novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. This terrible question and a blog post by a writer of novels for young adults made me think about why…
Poltroon, you say?
We are reading Romeo and Juliet in my seventh grade classes. I think R&J is more of a freshman book, but the frosh English teachers don’t teach it and the 8th grade teacher reads Macbeth with his class, so I gotta figure we can do something with this 400+ year old play that features a…
Yoknapatawpha Lite
I’ve got two big writing projects that I am juggling with the seventh grade right now. The first involves local history research, and a colleague and I are presenting it at the state technology conference; the other is a fiction writing assignment that grew out of reading 145th Street Stories by Walter Dean Myers. Myers…
Twitter me this friends…
I’m still looking for a book for this year. I frame the year around stories and storytelling and why we tell stories. I have a bunch already: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (here is my hole in the list) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare Inherit the Wind by Lawrence and Lee Haroun and the…
Living on the Lip of Insanity 