Recently I decided to include more music into my lessons. I started this with my American Literature courses (the College in the High School and mainstream classes), and my students have reacted quote favorably. Initially, I used The Who’s “Baba O’Rily” and “My Generation” with Anne Tyler’s “Teenage ...

I took a few pictures of projects for the end of The Great Gatsby unit. Each pair of students had to create an artistic rendition based on a quotation (Eckleburg’s eyes were popular) with an explanation, a sonnet connecting three characters, three essay question answers, and everything compiled into a display of some sort. Here are a few ...

A while ago I mentioned that I had my students research topics for the era in which our novels take place. We then used their findings to create visually pleasing bulletin boards. The requirements were: to include at least one image for each researched item, to type up a 6-8 sentence description or history for each selected item, to cite each ...

While reading The Grapes of Wrath with my class this month, I introduced the idea of pragmatism to the students. I used the two primary facets of this philosophy to help analyze the novel. These two characteristics of pragmatism are: 1) truth is mutable, and 2) things become true by verification (experience). If truth is relative [...]

According to a new study in a Washington Post article: At a time when more authors are writing more books for young people, fewer children are reading for pleasure. A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts showed that the percentage of 13- to 17-year-olds who read daily for fun dropped from 31 percent [...]

My American Literature class is still giving me grief. Only 19 of 32 students initially turned in the summary (that number is now 27 out of 32), and now only 18 of 32 turned in the thesis paragraph assigned two weeks ago. Grrr! After I call all the parents, I’m not sure what I’ll do. These [...]

I thought I’d post some updates on the goings on I’ve discussed previously. When my class created bulletin boards about the 1920s for The Great Gatsby, things did not go exactly as planned. Being literal-minded students, almost everyone basically created the exact same research piece–exactly as I had written up the assignment. A ...

I use a lesson format I call the fish bowl. Really, it’s a modified Socratic Seminar except that every student is not required to be an active speaking participant. I have 8-9 students circle up in the middle of the room with their notebooks and texts while the rest of the students make a circle [...]

Next week I’ll be using the following in preparation for The Great Gatsby in my College in the H.S. course: The Cotton Club clip Eight Men Out clip Izzy and Moe clip The History of Jazz clip “I’m a Fool” by Sherwood Anderson “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald “Soldier’s Home” by ...

Last night I attended some birthday bashes and, of course when a group of teachers get together, the conversation eventually leads back to teaching. One of the gang asked me why my year has been so successful, so I explained my new philosophy on grading. He then said that’s great, but how do I build [...]