Third Try
31 Mar 2009 4 Comments
in blogging
Okay, this is the third one I’ve tried. I know this is slightly nuts of me, but I can’t stop myself, somehow!
So this one is less graphically interesting, I think, but it does everything I want it to do, blog-wise, and I think the type size and organization is better.
Thoughts?
A Thousand Splendid Suns
30 Mar 2009 9 Comments
in authors, book reviews
Here’s template try #2. Please click through and let me know what you think of it in the comments! It’s available in green, blue, purple.
When I read The Kite Runner, I realized how much literature can do to bring us into a world we might never have experienced otherwise. Not the most groundbreaking observation, of course, but I think it’s especially important to assert in a world where we are losing newspapers and magazines by the day, and people are increasingly worried about the future of books.
I recently finished A Thousand Splendid Suns
I do agree with this NYT review that both novels are not notable for their plotting or characterization, but more for the beauty of the prose and the way Hosseini is able to immerse the reader entirely in a brutally authentic picture of life in Afghanistan over the past few decades. Will these novels be classics? If only for that authenticity, I believe they deserve to be read in the future. Would they have achieved such success in any other particular historical moment, if our culture was not so awash in diversity, multiculturalism and tolerance, and if we were not still sending soldiers to Afghanistan even now? I’m not sure. But it is, and we are, and these novels help us see the value of multiculturalism and the other side of this military engagement, and that is invaluable.
Template Experiments
30 Mar 2009 6 Comments
in blogging
If you’re reading this through some kind of feed-reader, would you do me a favor? Would you click through and tell me what you think of the new look? I’ve been messing around with it for awhile this afternoon, paging through all the free themes available on WordPress, feeling like I need a change but not quite thrilled with anything I’ve found yet.
I’m going to try a few different ones on for size, I think. This is the first one, which should have a grassy border image running along the type. So far, my misgiving is that the type is so small– I zoomed in a few times using the View function on my browser and that was better, but I don’t think I’ll want to do that every time I look at this page. I also feel funny having the sidebar on the left-hand side– it made me realize that my sidebars have always been on the right!
Times like these are when I get frustrated with myself for not knowing how to do anything beyond basic HTML, even though I built my first webpage nine years ago and have been blogging for years. I’ve always relied on free services, and every now and then I’ve gotten all het up about learning how to do more on my own, so that I could do more customizing and graphic stuff. Then I talk myself down and go back to the easy free stuff. At least this year, I did buy my own domain name and am finally “myname.com”.
Anyway, what do you think of this look? I’ll try a different template each day over the next few days, with a brief new post each time so you can tell me what you think. Even if you’ve never before commented on my blog, I would love it if you commented on these posts and helped me choose a new look.
Friday Poetry Blogging
27 Mar 2009 3 Comments
I still haven’t settled on a Friday blogging feature yet, but today I wrote a poem that I thought might be interesting to share.
We’ve had a visiting poet at my school this week who is absolutely amazing, and today she came to my class. We read and discussed her own work, talked about books and writing, and did a writing exercise involving a randomly chosen group of words and number of lines and a spontaneous poem that tries to incorporate a certain number of those words. I’d read the exercise before in The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach
Here’s what I wrote (please be kind):
We run down the hill together,
you are laughing, we are so close.
The house glows behind us,
the front door open, you
will always be the key.
The crushed blackberries
beneath our feet will always
bring me here to you.
When you are a ghost, I will
wrap myself in you
like an old flannel shirt, and
hold out my hand as we race
off the cliff together
and rise, rise, rise.
The Anti-Quiz
27 Mar 2009 9 Comments
in teaching
As a student, I rarely enjoyed taking quizzes. Either I did poorly because I didn’t understand the information being quizzed (often math), or did well because the quiz was so easy as to be worthless for me (usually in English class), or earned an average score and didn’t retain any of that information.
As a teacher, I’ve been moving more and more towards an anti-quiz philosophy. When I first started teaching college courses, I had occasional reading quizzes, especially in a class on art appreciation that was not meant to be writing-intensive. But as I’ve moved towards teaching courses that are writing-intensive, I have trouble justifying quizzes. I can’t identify a translatable skill, in writing, reading or life itself, that maps well to quizzes. Here are some candid reasons I’ve heard for the usefulness of quizzes (from a wide variety of teachers in-person and online):
* students don’t read if they’re not quizzed on the basics of the reading
* students who don’t read pay the price when they do poorly on quizzes
* students who are reading get rewarded by doing well on quizzes
* quizzes can lessen the impact of major assessments that have gone awry
So basically, we teachers often use quizzes as both the carrot and the stick, or as cushions when we need to inflate grades for one reason or another. Shouldn’t we be designing assessments that require reading the text? Is it our job to lessen the impact of tests that a class bombs, if they well and truly earned that bomb? What about short writing tasks, class participation, journal entries or other exercises that also reward the student who is reading and offer a reality check for the student that isn’t, while also building skills like writing?
Another more pedagogic reason:
* quizzes can be a good way to assess student knowledge of discrete pieces of information, most often vocabulary or grammar, or dates and facts for other disciplines
* quizzes are easy to grade, which especially for an English teacher, can lighten the heavy load of essay grading we all bemoan from time to time
Right now, the only quizzes I give as a teacher are part of an ongoing year-long grammar curriculum that I helped design. The students spend a full period about every other week studying a different unit of grammar (sentence fragments, verb tenses, pronouns, etc), and at the beginning of each grammar day, they take a quiz on the preceding lesson’s material. The questions are most often sentence-correction style, in keeping with the curriculum’s focus on grammar-in-writing. So far, while the students seem to be working well in the lessons and practice exercises, their quiz grades are often not good, and it’s made me wonder. I watch them sit with their books, trying to cram for the quiz, desperately reviewing material they should already know, and I think maybe it’s the quiz’s fault. Would they be this panicky if it wasn’t called a quiz, or would they take it less seriously and dismiss it? Would they be better able to show off their acquired skills if the assessment was somehow writing based? What would that assessment look like? How would it be graded?
I’m interested in your thoughts on quizzes, either as students, teachers, or parents. Am I overreacting? Do I have an unfair bias against quizzes?
Food Jags
26 Mar 2009 Leave a Comment
in all about me, cooking
My friend Lauren is on a cupcake jag right now. She’s been uploading a steady stream of mouthwatering photos of all these delicious cupcakes she’s been baking– pumpkin spice, red velvet, coconut, vanilla, gingerbread, all with the perfect icing, perfectly frosted, with adorable themed toppers like sparklers and hula girls. She’s one of the best cooks I know, but it’s funny how we sometimes get a taste for one thing, and only that one thing will do.
I was convinced for awhile that my friend Becca was going to bake every chocolate cake Nigella has ever made. This winter, we were on a pot roast jag for awhile, making it every other week, at least, and last summer I went on a pound cake jag. I don’t know why pound cake seems like such a summery cake to me– maybe because it goes so well with berries, or maybe because my stepmother used to bake it for my birthday in August for me. This past summer it went especially well with homemade peach ice cream. Lately I’ve been on a Crash Hot Potatoes jag, making a pan at a time and eating the whole thing myself.
Since my life has always been ordered on the academic calendar, this is the traditional time of year when I start to feel a bit frantic. So much needs to be done before the school year ends, which seems at once so distant and yet terrifyingly close. I start to slack off on meal planning, cooking and baking while I deal with piles of grading, plans for the next year, the distressing state of my house, dreams of summertime and all the ways I’ll be a better teacher next year. I’m really missing cooking and baking, so it’s nice to go on a virtual jag, watching Lauren’s cupcakes scroll by and knowing I’ll be baking again soon.
Shakespeare Set Free: Macbeth
25 Mar 2009 6 Comments
in book reviews, teaching
Both of my degrees are in American Studies, so I knew when I started teaching English that I was going to need to work hard on preparing to teach British literature, especially Shakespeare, the biggest Brit author of them all. I teach Macbeth and Hamlet, and have accumulated quite the pile of lesson plans and assignments for both, from online resources and my fellow teachers, but am always looking to improve how I deal with the texts in the classroom.
Enter Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth
So far I’ve read the scholarly essays, and already have learned so much about how to present the play to my students. I had never thought about the porter being a Shakespearean clown character, and I had no idea that Macbeth was not written during the Elizabethan age, but instead during the reign of King James, who believed himself to be a direct descendant of Banquo. Also, since the book is large enough to make good photocopies of handouts from lesson plans, the essay pages have nice wide margins for my own note-taking.
But even more importantly, I’ve found some great techniques in the lesson plans that I’m looking forward to employing, about ways to read scenes in class, how to encourage students to feel at home with the language, and tips on helping students “get a scene on its feet,” transforming it from page reading to actual acting out– setting Shakespeare free and all, you know. One introductory lesson has the students reading the same scene four times, each in different ways, with a few different groups of processing questions after each reading.
Teaching Shakespeare has partly been such a challenge for me because I didn’t really enjoy reading it when I was myself a student. My first exposure was in ninth grade, when a listless long-term substitute led us slowly through Romeo and Juliet, a unit of which my most vivid memories include watching the old black-and-white version with Leslie Howard, and then watching the lush Franco Zefferelli version with its two ripe young lovers. If we read any more Shakespeare in high school, I have no memory of it– my next memory is of a great class I took in college, with a professor visiting from the Folger Library, who introduced me to Othello and Richard III. I know I saw several performances of Shakespeare in those years, especially a Free for All performance of Twelfth Night, but also the production of Midsummer’s Night Dream done at my own high school. I’ve always enjoyed going to see Shakespeare, but always struggled with the reading, until I began teaching the plays. The language is beautiful, of course, but being able to imagine it on stage, in my head, and think of the different interpretations actors might choose has always been a challenge. Maybe it’s my own maturity, or that I’m much more motivated now, but I’ve found so much more richness in the texts than I ever did as a student.
With the help of great resources like Shakespeare Set Free, maybe I can help my students discover these treasures a lot sooner than I did.
Summer
24 Mar 2009 6 Comments
in all about me
This might sound ridiculous, but I really can’t imagine ever having a job where I had to continue working all summer. Sure, I “work” on teaching and I don’t stop writing, but to sit in an office all summer, as if summer wasn’t happening right outside? Incredible.
I have also always thought that true destiny intervened when I was the lucky recipient of a summer birthday. Sure, I groused and groaned all those years when the icing on my cake got goopy in the sun, and I couldn’t invite my friends to birthday parties because in the pre-playdate era, we all scattered to the winds, and I never got a classroom celebration the way other kids did.
But summer, when the sun is high and warm, the sky is wide and blue, and clothes are lightweight and bright– what better time to be born, or to celebrate a life?
I know it’s still March, and I should be singing of spring, but the long-desired rays of sunlight finally emerging from the winter’s gray clouds has gotten me a little summer-crazy.
Star Wars
23 Mar 2009 6 Comments
in all about me, media mentions
I was born one year after the first Star Wars movie came out, so it has quite literally shaped my initial understanding of popular culture. My older sister was an enormous fan, and the first few Christmases I remember all involve Star Wars toys– a Yoda hand puppet, the entire Ewok playset, and innumerable action figures. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the original trilogy, and I saw all of the newer three in the theaters, the last at a packed midnight showing with a dear friend who is equally obsessed.
I think there’s more than a few factors that attached me to the movies so deeply– Princess Leia as a swashbuckler in her own right, cuddly teddy-bear-esque Ewoks, the grand and sweeping scope at an impressionable age, the approval of my feared and admired older sister, or the appeal of moral absolutism for a little kid whose early years were somewhat topsy-turvy. There are very few people in my generation entirely unaffected by the Star Wars universe, which is clear in the immortality the movies have achieved thus far.
Recently we finally introduced our girls to the Star Wars universe, and it has been so satisfying. I really wanted to wait until I felt they were old enough, so that the scary parts wouldn’t taint the experience, and so they could entirely grasp all the glory that I remember and cherish. It seems we waited until the perfect age– they’ll be seven in May, and while they still covered their eyes when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn died, they were completely enthralled and excited at all the best moments.
So far, the girls have loved some of my favorite childhood books (like the Little House series) and have not enjoyed others (A Little Princess), so I was nervous about this one, and I have surprised myself with how much it meant to me that they fell in love with the galaxy far, far way, just like I did.
Spring Break
20 Mar 2009 1 Comment
in all about me
I saw my first crocuses yesterday, and there are little green sprouts all over my front yard. This past fall I planted a bunch of different flowering bulbs, and it seems like some of them are coming up! The weather has started to warm up, and it seems that spring is finally here.
I’m winding down my spring break, and feeling lukewarm about it. I started the break with a huge pile of grading, and that pile of grading has not diminished. I painted our downstairs hallway, but haven’t hung anything back on the wall. I’m halfway through painting the upstairs bathroom, but my energy is starting to flag. I’ve slept in a lot, which has been fantastic, but it’s only reminding me how tired I’ve been this school year. After the flu, both my girls have caught some kind of noxious cold that left them with a thick, wet chest cough that is lingering far too long.
To tell the truth, all this “break” has done is make me long for summer. One of the best aspects of the teaching profession, at this time of year, is knowing that summer is coming.
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