Teaching
-
As we begin our study of poetry in my English classes, we are preparing for our participation in Poetry Out Loud, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Instead of reviewing the list of approved poems for the competition, I first take my students through a Daybook writing activity where they answer…
-
We are exactly one week away from students showing up in our classrooms and beginning that next year-long journey of their high school experience, and we spent the day at countywide Professional Learning sessions. Ours in the English Language Arts weren’t bad at all. We were fortunate to spend the morning with this year’s HoCoPoLitSo…
-
For the past month, I have been reading, writing, and reflecting on what we – more selfishly, I – can do about the increasing crises and tensions in America. I posed this question in my May 8th blog titled, “How Do We Act In This American Crisis?“: What am I already doing naturally, on a…
-
Rus VanWestervelt’s latest work, 2732 Prisms of Love-Stained Light, is scheduled to launch worldwide on 21 December 2021, but you can pre-order your copy today through December 15 at a reduced price. Benefits of preordering include: – Personalized copy signed by the author – Price reduced to just $11 for hand-delivered copies – Shipping only…
-
Many years ago, Sharon Miller, National Writing Project Teacher-Consultant and nationally recognized author and educator in the teaching of writing, asked me to offer my thoughts on the power of revision in the genre of creative nonfiction and how, when we write with intent in the revision process and understand who our audience is, we…
-
Dateline – Tuesday, 28 January 1986. 11:35 a.m. I’m upstairs in my bedroom, cramming the last of my new textbooks in my bag, grabbing a few extra pens and my journal, and checking my look in the mirror: clean-shaven, every single hair gelled in place, and wearing a white oxford with a blue Hugo Boss…
-
I’ve included some of my favorite photos that I’ve taken over the years; it’s not that they are terribly relevant to the content of this post…I just think they capture my life over the last fifty years. So this is what 50 feels like. I have this urge to knock over a food display at…
-
Looking for Sage Wisdom More than anything else, I remember his face, ripped with an ugly mash up of dull red stress and those deep lines of resigned anger in the corners of his eyes, along his forehead, and drawing down at the tips of his lips. He pushed his cart from one classroom to…
-
School resumes tomorrow. Earlier today, I could feel some anxiety rising–that feeling of stress and the fast pace that keeps you moving non-stop through six periods and 140+ students as you juggle and manage and direct and teach and coach and listen and– So overwhelming, when you look at it like that. Isn’t it? Heading…
-
It reached 77 degrees today, on this, the 24th of August. Blue sky, patchy white clouds, and the eerie absence of a Baltimore humidity that makes thousands of locals usually proclaim, “It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.” In Baltimore, it’s been neither this summer; just one late-spring day after another. Heat waves have lasted…
You must be logged in to post a comment.