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 [...]

Today we started the film The Matrix and the kids are enthralled. What a great feeling to know they are learning the literary devices and analyzing while enjoying the process. Also, I introduced the double-entry journal, the Christ-like character attributes, and the heroic cycle. Everyone dove right in to the the work. While watching the film I ...

I purchased some movie units from Michael Vetrie, an alternative high school teacher in Sun Valley, CA, and I’m going to try one tomorrow. I will show The Matrix in half-hour segments, so the students can do the following: compose a double-entry journal, study the film using literary terms, analyze critical quotations in the novel plot how ...

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 [...]

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 ...