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 [...]

While I assess diction analysis papers, personal essay, and literary analysis essays this week in the evening, I have scheduled enrichment films for my students. Here they are: Reading A Gathering of Old Men Malcolm X Separate But Equal Mississippi Burning Reading Frankenstein Edward Scissorhands Frankenstein Reading The Iliad Troy 300 Any ...

Here is a list of my favorite literary works of length to teach: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The Crucible by Arthur Miller A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens What are your favorite pieces of literature to teach? [...]

I love using film clips or outside of class movies to enrich my students’ learning experiences, and the kids respond enthusiastically when I do use the cinema to enhance units. Any suggestions? I have the following novels to teach this semester: To Kill A Mockingbird, Frankenstein, Fahrenheit 451, A Gathering of Old Men, and Beowulf. I ...

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 [...]

What do Brutus (from The Tragedy of Julius Caesar) and John Anderton (from Minority Report) have in common? The answer is: pre-crime, preemptive action. And this is why my Sophomores will have the opportunity to watch Minority Report after school with popcorn and pop. I don’t tell the kids why they are watching the film, and [...]

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 ...

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 [...]