Literary Lists of “Ten Best”

May 8, 2010 by

Ten Street SignThe UK newspaper The Guardian has an ongoing series that focuses on “The 10 Best of” a variety of topics. They’ve covered a range of interests, including fashion, movies, comedy, politics, and music. Fortunately for those of us who teach literature, The Guardian feature has included these unusual literary lists of ten:

You’ll find that some of the lists are stronger than others. For instance, I was disappointed to find that the heroes from children’s fiction focused solely on white heroes, and the books about war failed to include Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. How could a list of best war books not include The Things They Carried?!

What the lists do extremely well however is demonstrate a great amount of creativity in topics. That’s certainly the only list of best pairs of glasses or best tattoos I’ve ever seen. Sometimes the lists are particularly relevant to current events, such as the best elections list published today. If you do nothing more than read through the lists, you’re bound to find a new text to add to your reading list—or a reminder of a text that would be enjoyable to revisit.

Come back tomorrow for a great year-end activity inspired by these literary lists!

Filed under American Lit, British Literature, classroom activities, Literature

You’ll Like This Grammar Lesson Alot :)

April 23, 2010 by

Yes, I really mean “alot” and not “a lot.” As the website Hyperbole and a Half explains:

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

If you have students making the dreaded alot spelling error, this imaginary creature is bound to be a memorable solution. Besides, who wouldn’t love this cute creature alot!

[Found via @craniac]

Filed under classroom activities Tagged with

Video Interview of Author Tim O’Brien

April 22, 2010 by

Vietnam War Soldier Helmet, CC Flickr photo by MattsipIf you’re teaching Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, be sure to take a look at Big Think’s video interview with the author.

In addition to talking about his novel, O’Brien talks about the process of writing and the role that literature plays in our lives. Having just written an Inbox blog on making personal connections to the texts that we read, I was especially taken by O’Brien’s story about how his writing had touched one specific reader. He concludes by noting that “Literature does touch people; it’s not just to be read in English classes.”

The video interview is accompanied by a text transcript, so you can read excerpts to your classes if you do not have the equipment to play the video itself in the classroom.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mattsip]

Filed under American Lit, classroom activities, Literature Tagged with , , , , ,

Helping Readers See Themselves in a Text (NCTE Inbox Blog)

April 21, 2010 by

Girl reading, CC Flickr photo by SanJoseLibraryAs a young reader, I wanted stories about young girls, about their accomplishments as women, and about the journeys they took from child to adult. I didn’t want to be bothered with stories of boys becoming apprentices, men fighting battles, or chopping their way through forests. I wanted to see people who were like me. I wanted to read about people who were like the person I wanted to become. Read more in my Inbox blog and learn how helping readers make personal connections to texts is related to El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) on April 30.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by SanJoseLibrary]

Filed under classroom activities, NCTE Inbox Tagged with ,

Why You Should Try Twitter in the Classroom

February 2, 2010 by

If you’re even slightly interested in how you might use Twitter in the classroom, take a look at William M. Ferriter’s essay “Why Teachers Should Try Twitter” from Educational Leadership.

The article explains, “For educators who use this tool to build a network of people whose Twitter messages connect to their work, Twitter becomes a constant source of new ideas to explore.” It includes some tips and how-to’s as well as a personal story on how the experience affected the author’s understanding of differentiated instruction.

Filed under classroom activities, Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with

Change Your Metaphor

January 25, 2010 by

No more plug and play education. It’s time for more blossom and grow! Okay, so the metaphors aren’t really parallel. I guess it should be plant and grow, but that’s not as catchy. The difference between the two metaphors, though, it spot on for what we need to pursue for effective instruction.

I wrote about educational metaphors for NCTE’s Inbox blog this week. I wasn’t really thinking about the different ways of thinking about education until I read the PDF of Chapter One from Rebecca Bowers Sipe’s Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards.

The agrarian metaphor for the educational system that Sipe outlines suddenly clicked perfectly with the “growth mindset” that I read about last fall in the article“The Truth about Grit,” published in The Boston Globe. (You can read more about that article in one of my Bedford Bits blogs from last October.)

The words we use always matter. In the case of metaphors, they can matter more than we may realize. The industrial metaphor for education has brought us a classroom where the strategies and information can be uniform. There’s no accounting for the differentiation of the students. Every student is the same. Teachers just plug in the units, and students are ready to go.

Course, in the real classroom, every student is different. That’s why plug and play strategies don’t work—and why we need to shift the way we think about education back to a more agrarian model that relies on strategies that help students blossom and grow.

Filed under classroom activities Tagged with ,

Bits Post: Warning: No Yelling in the Food Court

December 10, 2009 by

Try this incredibly simple but quite useful analogy to reach students who are struggling with issues of audience and style. Soon they’ll be speaking to, and not at, their audience.

Filed under Bedford Bits, classroom activities Tagged with ,

WFMAD 5: Word Geek

August 5, 2009 by

Dear Teacher,
I completely fail at vocabulary exercises. Sure, I can use your words in a sentence, but they sound like words I was told to use in a sentence. They never sound like anything natural. No matter how much I try to rephrase or revise, they all sound wrong.

Maybe it’s that there’s no context. Just a floating sentence with some new word. Maybe context would help.

Shive: She looked at the three sets of hungry eyes staring up at her and then back at the bare crust of bread in her hand. She turned to the counter, away from their faces, and shived and slivered the crust into three transparent slices, hoping they wouldn’t see the tears that fell on the board as she worked.

Hmm. Not really. That sounds like some toss off from a Grapes of Wrath draft. Or some really awful Lifetime movie about a welfare mother. The word didn’t even get to have star-billing. It didn’t feel right without the “and slivered” bit. Just not right. Definite FAIL.

Why do teachers want us to write these vocabulary sentences anyway? Do they really think that this is going to help us actually use these crazy words? Maybe they don’t want us to use them. Maybe we’re just supposed to recognize them in some Shakespeare thing later. I just don’t see the point, but w/e. I’ll write your sentences.

Dwale: “It’s pure dwale to presume that someone will learn a word just by dropping it in an awkward sentence that they’d otherwise never write,” she said to her English teacher, Mrs. Grimes.

WFMAD stands for “Writing for Fifteen Minutes a Day.” Author Laurie Halse Anderson has declared August as the 2009 Write Fifteen Minutes A Day Challenge Month. Each day she posts some writing advice, some inspiration, and a prompt to get the writing flowing. For more information, see her blog.

Teachers can use a similar project to discuss writing successes and challenges (as well as get some fast drafting done). As my Inbox blog entry this week explains, it’s an easy way to build community in just 15 minutes!

Filed under classroom activities

Newer posts →