Monthly Archives: April 2009

Once More, with Feeling

Posted by Jackie in blogging, teaching

So I logged onto WordPress, thinking about noodling around with a post after sending out a slew of work-related emails and feeling in a state of poetic-paralysis as the Poem-A-Day challenge winds down.

And look! WordPress has a new springtime theme! And it does everything I wanted, and it’s sharp-looking and well-sized and fresh, and I think that finally, my search for a new theme is over! Feel free to tell me you hate it though, or even if your only response is, “Meh.”

But seriously, because I am superstitious and was raised Irish Catholic, I also wanted to make sure I made it clear that although I am feeling a bit overwhelmed still, I am absolutely thrilled with where my career is right now. There are some new developments I’m not ready to post about right now, but I feel incredibly lucky to be doing the work I’m doing, teaching the students I’m teaching, and working with the amazing colleagues I have.

Sometimes in the past five years, as I revised my resume, I would feel a bit panicky, wondering if I had made the right choices, wondering if I would ever reach my main goals. These days, after going through the evaluation processes and really thinking seriously about my career, I look at my resume and think, “Everything I’ve done has been leading me to this place.”

It’s a pretty amazing feeling, I have to say, and I’m trying to remember that even in the middle of these hectic times.

Post-Hiatus

Posted by Jackie in all about me, media mentions

Well, that blogging break turned out to be a bit longer than I expected! I don’t often take blogging breaks, but recently it was certainly warranted.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

* I serve as the faculty sponsor for the GSA at the private school where I teach during the day. This spring, our theater department chose to produce The Laramie Project, which garnered us a spot on the WBC’s protest calendar. I helped our students organize a peaceful event the students could attend in order to show our support for our production and community. We went through seventeen boxes of pizza, showed Milk and welcomed students from at least five different area schools. The production was a smash hit, the protest was present but small, and the students felt encouraged and supported in their encounter with this kind of protest and activism.

* I have written twenty-three poems as part of the Poem-A-Day challenge for National Poetry Month. I’m a few poems behind, since today’s the 27th, but I’m thrilled to have made it this far and still very hopeful that I will finish the month and the challenge by Thursday. Some of the poems I’ve written are rather workmanlike, but more than once, I really felt inspired, and I’m excited to sift through the pile this summer and see what I can refine and polish

* Assorted family challenges: I baked 24 bee-themed cupcakes for a meeting of Environmental Club where we had a beekeeper speak to the club, spent time with my sister who’s going through a rough break-up, and cheered my husband as he finished up research projects and moved into exam time. I also washed a lot of dishes and mowed the grass and watched spring flowers bloom. We had our first cookout of the spring time, and I made my first cream cheese pound cake (but certainly not my last!).

* I saw State of Play (meh) and went to hear David McCullough speak as part of the Baltimore Speaker Series, which was absolutely amazing. I’ve read his two prize-winning biographies of John Adams and Truman and also his 1776, but had never heard him speak before. My mother, who came with me, was especially thrilled to hear his praise and support of teachers. I also read The Clothes On Their Backs, which was great in a stark, British literary kind of way, and started reading The Ministry of Special Cases, which is evoking The Yiddish Policemen’s Union without feeling derivative (high praise if you know my love of Chabon’s work).

* I also went to many meetings, have a huge stack of ungraded papers, and have been observed teaching thrice, twice at my day job and once at my evening school. As the end of the semester is fast approaching, I can’t promise daily blogging again yet, but will be checking in much more regularly (I hope).

Update

Posted by Jackie in all about me

So I’m behind in grading at both jobs, the sink is full of dishes, the grass needs cutting, I’m being evaluated at both my jobs over the next two weeks, Sophie threw up in her classroom today, my sister’s girlfriend broke up with her very abruptly and my husband’s finals are rapidly approaching. It goes without saying, I believe, that I have not been able to keep up with the poem-a-day project, though I have gotten some good drafts down on paper and am keeping track of all the prompts.

So in short, I’ve hit the wall, and am not quite ready to pick up the blogging reins again yet.

April Is The Cruelest Month

Posted by Jackie in all about me

This point in the school year is always the worst, in my own humble opinion, and this year seems especially rough. Students are either wandering the hallways bemoaning tougher college admissions, or wandering campus bemoaning the worst job market in decades that awaits them after graduation. Others are staring down AP exams or trying to cram overloaded schedules with requirement upon requirement. My piles of grading seem to be self-perpetuating, and finals loom ahead. The weather is either incredibly lovely and springlike, which we must view from behind our classroom windows, or gray and wet with torrential downpours into which we must soldier forth. I’m tired of all my winter clothes, but it’s not quite warm enough for my warm-weather gear. The end of the semester/year seems at once impossibly faraway and terrifyingly close. All of us are weary and ready for summer.

I guess this is where I should offer a hopeful thought to keep us slogging through, but instead, I’m just trying to keep my head down and keep putting one foot ahead of the other.

Save the Words

Posted by Jackie in authors, poetry, teaching

I found Save the Words from Dana at Huff English, and it made me start thinking about how to use it in teaching. Wouldn’t this be a cool poetry-writing exercise? Maybe even as a fun way to celebrate National Poetry Month, as quick prompts? Maybe even a worthy extra credit exercise? This could be fun for fiction-writing exercises too, I think. Students could write poems that define the words, or just try and write a story or passage that uses the word in such a way where the meaning is absolutely clear, or even a character sketch that shows how a person could exemplify their chosen word.

I did something similar with a Forgotten English Tear-Off Calendar I picked up on clearance at a bookstore when I was teaching Gerard Manley Hopkins with ninth graders last year. I spread out the words on the table, and they each had to choose a few and write a poem that contained them (but not necessarily defining them). One of the aspects of his poetry that I love is how he combines words to make new hybrid words, which you can see at work in Carrion Comfort among many others. I felt this exercise really encouraged the students to think carefully about vocabulary.

For me, teaching vocabulary is like teaching grammar– there’s a lot of memorizing involved, but it is important also to make sure students use the words and concepts so that they retain them. We talk about etymology and make connections for prefixes and suffixes whenever possible, but I’m always looking for new ways to help it all stick for my students.

Eat Your Veggies

Posted by Jackie in conversations, cooking

One of my cooking phobias has to do with vegetables. Since I discovered the supertaster concept, I have suspected that I am one, and I think my Lucy may be as well. Many vegetables, especially green ones, are simply to strongly flavored for me, and so cooking veggies beyond corn, green beans and carrots is tricky. But I have expanded my tastes since childhood– I eat mayonnaise now, and gravy, and a lot of other items and flavors I never would have before.

Recently one of my neighbors wrote a great piece for a local magazine about their experiences with a CSA share, and the idea of being overwhelmed with greens the way they were was daunting, to say the least. But the way the article was written did give me some hope, and if you’re my Facebook friend, you may have seen me post the video of my neighbors cooking a frittata! Then another friend posted this article on learning to love foods you hate, and some of those recipes looked tempting even to me.

So keep your fingers crossed, and maybe sometime soon, you’ll hear me raving about roasted brussel sprouts or cauliflower gratin!

Donald Hall

Posted by Jackie in authors, poetry, teaching, writing

One common piece of advice for poets, especially those of us outside of writing programs, is to read as much poetry as you can, from classic to contemporary. I teach a variety of classic poets in my classes, so that part is easier for me– I find that teaching a poem to a class helps me get inside of it better than anything else. I also try to bring in contemporary poetry as often as possible, like a unit I did this fall where we read Metaphysical and Romantic poets, but also response poems written by contemporary authors.

Recently, I’ve read two books of poems by the great Donald Hall, Without: Poems and The Painted Bed: Poems. Both books are dominated by poems about the death of Hall’s wife, poet Jane Kenyon.

Hall is often spoken of like Robert Frost, another plainspoken American male poet with ties to New Hampshire. For me as a reader, Hall’s work has an inventiveness and tenderness in these two books that is breathtaking, especially as he writes his way through a sorrow and grief that I cannot imagine. As a poet, I feel like I have a lot to learn from his way of making his language sparse and yet so evocative. It also makes me want to read more of his work, and also of Kenyon’s.

Teaching with OneNote

Posted by Jackie in media mentions, teaching

During the day, I teach in a laptop school, which means that we as a faculty are encouraged to think about integrating technology into our teaching in as many useful ways as we can. We are even lucky enough to have a tech department on campus to assist us, but I think that many times, I use them most often to put out fires (viruses, faulty equipment) and not often enough to really integrate technology into my classroom practices.

Almost at the end of my second year, I think I’ve done a fair job of integrating technology into my teaching. I am very available to my students over email for questions or comments on a draft, and I also make myself very accessible to parents over email. Students often submit materials over email, which is also part of our school’s mission to be as paperless as possible. I have a lot of materials on my faculty website, and we often use them in class, including a number of webquests I’ve either assembled or acquired to begin many of the units (though there are more I’d like to use from that site). With my juniors this year, I did a Gatsby Facebook project. For next year, I have student blogging plans, which I’ve only done before with college students, but I’m also excited about using a Microsoft program called OneNote a lot more.

We recently had a speaker come to talk to us about this program, and since then I’ve been going kind of nuts with it. There are a lot of ways in which it can be useful, and Microsoft seems to have put a lot of effort into encouraging people to try it out, especially us teachers. There are also a lot of functions I haven’t used yet, like audio files, notes, screen clipping, etc, but I have set up a notebook for each grade I teach, plus a personal one, plus a recipes one, and finally a teaching portfolio. I’ve also gotten into the habit of sending a lot of my documents and links into OneNote notebooks, and am thrilled with how handy it is so far.

One of the major aspects of OneNote is being able to share notebooks with other users of the program, and also to make those notebooks password-protected so that only the users can access them. Next year, I’m thinking about having each student set up a OneNote notebook that is shared with me. Not only could I then add documents, links, videos and more to their notebooks before a class, but I could also check in on their note-taking, and add audio comments to any materials they were working on in there. I’m also looking for inspiration for other ways to use it, like this huge blog post on ways to teach with OneNote, including templates and ways to use OneNote as e-portfolio.

It’s a constant struggle to integrate technology in ways that are appropriate without letting the tech obscure the teaching, and without going for the new shiny gimmick even though it doesn’t do much to enhance pedagogy and comprehension. I definitely look to other teachers for inspiration, and I know my teaching is better because of the many resources I’ve found on the Internet. I’m hoping that as I grow more and more experienced as a teacher, I don’t lose my curiosity about technology, and continue to seek new ways to use it.

National Poetry Month

Posted by Jackie in personal goals, poetry, writing

April is National Poetry Month, and I’m celebrating in a few different ways here at school, and also trying to celebrate a little in my daily life. I signed up for the Poem-A-Day email from the Academy of American Poets, and am trying to think of ways to bring in some poetry for my classes. I also signed up for the Poetic Asides April Poem a Day challenge, where each day the blogger will post a different prompt, and you can write a poem based on it. I felt inspired after my recent ten-minute poem, so I thought surely, I could spare ten minutes or so each day, right? Today’s prompt was to write an origin poem, and so I wrote “The First Cupcake.” I’m going to post some of them through April and probably even into May, as an exercise in bravery and accountability.

Are you doing anything for Poetry Month? Want a poem a day email, or a poem a day challenge, like me? Or maybe, on April 30th or so, you’d like a Poem in Your Pocket? I would love to take part in the Free Verse Project, marrying poetry and photography. If I get really ambitious, next year I’ll spend April in a Poetry Read-a-Thon with my students.

Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy my own poetry parties this month.