Two of my favorite teachers, both journalism instructors, are admittedly not the typical readers. One reads only non-fiction books, newspaper and magazine articles, and online list serves while the other contends he’s “not the typical English teacher” because he only reads online articles, list serves, and blogs. Even though they ...

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 ...

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 [...]

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 have a fantastic week ahead. In my American Literature course we are finishing Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Raven.” Then the students get to finish their final projects, which they created for themselves. In my College in the H.S. class we are reviewing for next week’s final, and then these ...