Saturday, January 23, 2010
Midterm Week: The Most Boring Week Ever
I know they're necessary... but I really hate midterm week. I rarely have a class. I am merely watching over kids as they take midterms for other subjects. (Although on Tuesday they will take mine...) My plan right now is to use all that time to grade while proctoring. I also want to start planning some new lessons for my poetry unit using the new SMART board in my classroom! I know the government has a website Poetry180. The site offers one poem per school day for high school students in America. I used this site quite a bit when I taught summer school. I'm trying to search for new ideas to get some interactive lessons going. My kids dread poetry; I want to make it better for them. Any ideas?
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Yea!
I got it! The catalog for summer courses for credit was published! It looks like I'll finally get to teach Creative Writing!
Sunday, January 10, 2010
New Ideas, Tough Decisions
If you saw CBS' Sunday Morning Show, you may have seen the segment dealing with creativity. I wish I had the fore-thought to start the DVR when it came on, but now-a-days, I am sure there is a version "downloadable" (new verb I just made up) on YouTube. The summer class I might get to teach has got me focused on collecting examples of creativity across the content areas. I am looking for art, technology, science anything! This segment was perfect. It captured the spirit of creativity I was hoping to encourage in potential creative writing students. Creativity comes in so many shapes, sizes, areas and ideas. How can I bring more of that into all of my classes?
This weekend my "Smart Board" is being installed. I have been waiting for this thing since October. One of the coolest things I can do is hook up my Kindle to the board and point out specific passages and ideas to students. This is will definitely come into play in the summer. I can just imagine reading items together, examining sentences, words and ideas interactively. The potential for lessons just shot through the roof! I have one lesson I have been dying to do again, now that I have a permanent Smart Board... there's no waiting. One website I enjoy using is a Create your Own Comic site. I use this to help students grasp the idea of inference and using text clues to draw conclusions. The kids look at the position of different characters and create the potential dialogue for said characters. We take turns showing one another different scenes, writing different dialogue and moving/working backwards.
It has been brought to my attention one of the teachers in the high school is thinking of retiring at the end of this year, but definitely by next year. This has got me thinking about putting in for a transfer to teacher AP and Gemini classes. A lot of training is involved. I don't want to say the job is more labor intensive than what I do now... but it is a different type of laboring. Seniors in high school need 12th grade English to graduate. They're writing serious reserach papers and preparing for their entrance into the workforce or post secondary education. Having recently done these things I feel like I have an advantage on one side... conversely I questions whether I can weather the transition from middle school.
I love middle school. I love the students, I work with amazing teachers. My principal allows for collaboration and ideas to flow freely (not that the high school principal wouldn't, I don't know really...) but I am.... comfortable. I have always wanted to teach the classics... encourage the dicsussion and controversy that comes with this literature. But part of me wonders if that's still what I want.
When I first got into teaching, I pictured myself discussing William Golding and Shakespeare, Harper Lee and Chaucer... I didn't think I'd be fearing a state test, introducing how to write an essay and using the lyrics of Miley Cyrus songs to help teach poetry and rhyme scheme...
From this uncertainty can come great rewards... I think about a quotation I love from Neiztche
"One must experience chaos in life to give birth to a dancing star." Or something incredibly close to that... I will have to track down my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Ideas??
This weekend my "Smart Board" is being installed. I have been waiting for this thing since October. One of the coolest things I can do is hook up my Kindle to the board and point out specific passages and ideas to students. This is will definitely come into play in the summer. I can just imagine reading items together, examining sentences, words and ideas interactively. The potential for lessons just shot through the roof! I have one lesson I have been dying to do again, now that I have a permanent Smart Board... there's no waiting. One website I enjoy using is a Create your Own Comic site. I use this to help students grasp the idea of inference and using text clues to draw conclusions. The kids look at the position of different characters and create the potential dialogue for said characters. We take turns showing one another different scenes, writing different dialogue and moving/working backwards.
It has been brought to my attention one of the teachers in the high school is thinking of retiring at the end of this year, but definitely by next year. This has got me thinking about putting in for a transfer to teacher AP and Gemini classes. A lot of training is involved. I don't want to say the job is more labor intensive than what I do now... but it is a different type of laboring. Seniors in high school need 12th grade English to graduate. They're writing serious reserach papers and preparing for their entrance into the workforce or post secondary education. Having recently done these things I feel like I have an advantage on one side... conversely I questions whether I can weather the transition from middle school.
I love middle school. I love the students, I work with amazing teachers. My principal allows for collaboration and ideas to flow freely (not that the high school principal wouldn't, I don't know really...) but I am.... comfortable. I have always wanted to teach the classics... encourage the dicsussion and controversy that comes with this literature. But part of me wonders if that's still what I want.
When I first got into teaching, I pictured myself discussing William Golding and Shakespeare, Harper Lee and Chaucer... I didn't think I'd be fearing a state test, introducing how to write an essay and using the lyrics of Miley Cyrus songs to help teach poetry and rhyme scheme...
From this uncertainty can come great rewards... I think about a quotation I love from Neiztche
"One must experience chaos in life to give birth to a dancing star." Or something incredibly close to that... I will have to track down my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Ideas??
Friday, January 1, 2010
The Triggering Town
When I was an undergraduate student, I read a book on writing by Richard Hugo, entitled The Triggering Town. This holiday break I re-read the book and re-highlighted, re-notated...
This got me thinking about how important it is to show my students I am a writer too. I have to share that part of what I do... Art, writing, teaching, education don't occur in a vacuum. Their lives are so different from mine, our experiences rich for their own reasons. Will they be able to see that? Do they think of themselves writers?
"I think literature should be studied for the most serious of all reasons: it is fun. For a young writer it should be exciting as well (Hugo, xii)."
This got me thinking about how important it is to show my students I am a writer too. I have to share that part of what I do... Art, writing, teaching, education don't occur in a vacuum. Their lives are so different from mine, our experiences rich for their own reasons. Will they be able to see that? Do they think of themselves writers?
"I think literature should be studied for the most serious of all reasons: it is fun. For a young writer it should be exciting as well (Hugo, xii)."
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