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 [...]

I turned the movie evening with my students into a hot dog feed. While they watched the movie (Minority Report because of reading Julius Caesar), I barbecued hot dogs and provided chips and pop. It was great! The best part was watching the kids figure out why I showed them this Tom Cruise action flick. Suddenly [...]

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 ...

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 [...]

Is it possible to create a culture of failure? My school is currently being asked to discover why the Freshman failure rate is so high. 1/3 of the Freshmen failed a class during their first semester in high school, and statistically speaking 30% of Freshmen who fail a course in their first high school year do [...]

I’m not teaching as well as I should want to right now. I’m just going to throw out my frustrations in a venting session and call it good. Catharsis time. 1. My classes are just too large! My smallest class has thirty kids, and all of my courses are literature and writing courses. I’m getting [...]

I finally decided to give my final projects to my students in my Sophomore Honors class. They are going to choose three of the following four options for their A Tale of Two Cities project: 1. The students must choose a moving or critical quotation or passage and create a visual representation based on it. Paintings, drawings, and the like are ...