I’m such a geek when it comes to teaching. Two weeks after the school year concludes, I’m ready to start again. Since I can’t have a classroom full of students to teach, I go back and revise and adapt my curriculum lessons during July and August. This year I have some more revisions to make, [...]

Two novels I taught this year were To Kill A Mockingbird and A Gathering of Old Men. Prior to and during reading these novels, I had the kids look at some songs, poems, and historical context. Here are a few of my favorite things concerning the race relations in the novels. Prior to reading To Kill [...]

When teaching denotation and connotation I use numerous poems in addition to the literature we are reading (The Crucible’s use of “cold” is an excellent example if you are reading it, which we just were). Here are three I use with my classes: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (also great for alliteration) He ...

you promised me starts and moon all i taste the ash of earth... is it pain..? or a blow revealing the emptiness.. when the walls are shattered aloneness emerges... thy face thy eyes thy smile in the middle.. ..of cloudy thoughts...a light shines.

Back in the ''old'' days, it was common practice to have students memorize large amounts of material.  How could I know that whole segments would stay with me for years to come?  I have thought of many of Robert Frost's poems over the years.  One of my teachers in high school was particularly fond of him and had us ...

Without a mandatory retirement age, Rose ''Mama G'' Gilbert is still getting a kick out of teaching at the age of eighty-eight.  She is a full time literature teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District.  Although she is the oldest teacher in the district, there are two eighty-seven year olds also teaching full ...