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Setting in Art, Photography, and Video
As a follow-up on yesterday’s post about visual sources for characterization — from writing character to “reading” it via inference — I’m following up today with similar resources for setting. Again,...
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Teaching Specifics in Writing? Let Them Lie!
Most students are unfamiliar with the old TV show, To Tell the Truth, but you can sum it up quite nicely by saying it was a game show that paid people to lie. In fact, the better you were at lying, the...
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Irony, Humor, and Death — Idea of the Week #27
When teaching that slippery concept called irony, a lot of teachers try the lyrics to Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic.” Ironically enough, however, not much in that song is actually ironic. (Then...
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Billy Collins’s TED Talk? Poetry-Writing Lesson!
Strange bedfellows. It’s a figure of speech for any odd combination that often and paradoxically proves effective. I use the term in an attempt to teach one of the more ineffable aspects of poetry —...
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Leaving Your Comfort Zone — Idea of the Week #34
T. S. Eliot had it wrong — May and June are the cruelest months. He’d know as much if he were a teacher, watching senioritis infect not only seniors but juniors, sophomores, freshmen, 8th graders, and...
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Inferring To Music: Idea of the Week #54
Can we possibly give our students enough inference practice? If there were a vote, I’d nay with the sayers and shout, “Of course not!” Does that mean that students must struggle with a poem every day...
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Film Clips for Characterization, Context, Quotes, and Commentary
Today I visited 8th grade boot camp (or, as we call it here, the 7th grade). According to their teachers, students have been doing creditable work in their analysis of characters in Paul Fleischman’s...
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Hijacking the Super Bowl ~ Idea of the Week #57
I am often amazed when I talk sports with boys in my homeroom. I know enough about sports to be dangerous, as they say, but these boys — many of them participants in fantasy leagues — know their teams,...
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Bridges Between Film & Literature — Idea of the Week #66
In the March issue of Educational Leadership, Kent State associate professor William Kist authored a piece called “New Literacies and the Common Core,” in which he encourages teachers to consider...
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Pass the Popcorn; Create a Video ~ Idea of the Week #69
The New York Times Learning Blog is featuring Mozilla’s popcorn maker, and I am adding it to the Links page of this blog for permanent reference. A 20th-century guy to the core, I’m always barnstorming...
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