During the Holocaust unit with the Butterfly Project I discussed yesterday, I also do the following: show Schindler’s List after school, have the students compose a diction analysis with The Chosen, show (in a period) the Oprah episode with Eli Wiesel revisiting Buchenwald, have the students write a reaction to Night to their parents (and ...

I may be unable to blog for a couple days, so here is a list of some of my more popular posts from my brief blogging history. I hope these links spark some conversation and, more importantly, some thought on a range of education topics. 1. Teaching Connotation and Denotation (and its follow up post and some poems to use) 2. Using the movie The ...

This week my students are working on the diction analysis, which is an assignment requiring the students do the following: choose a section of text containing about 150 words, identify at least 6 literary devices, persuasive techniques, or logical fallacies, explain the effect of each device, compose a paragraph explaining the context of the ...

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 [...]

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 ...

When teaching denotation and connotation I use numerous poems in addition to the literature we are reading (The Crucible’s use of “cold” is an excellent example if you are reading it, which we just were). Here are three I use with my classes: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (also great for alliteration) He ...

To follow my previous post, here is another exercise I use with my students regarding adjectives. First, I put a list of words on the board all synonymous with “angry:” mad, upset, incensed, perturbed, enraged, disgusted, indignant, annoyed, peeved, infuriated, provoked, and irate. If I have the time I sometimes give each small group ...

One of the first sets of literary devices I teach at any level is connotation and denotation. These are two of the most basic diction analysis techniques for students to learn since they are wide-reaching and allow students to discover tone, mood, inferences, and more. Denotation (the primary definition of a word) and connotation (the [...]

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 ...