huffenglish.com

Biography | Teaching Responsibilities | My Technology | Texts I Use | This Site

I am Dana Huff, and I currently teach 9-12th (quite literally) grade English and a 10th grade Writing Seminar at the Weber School, a private Jewish high school in the Atlanta metro-area. I been teaching since 1997; I taught middle school Language Arts and Journalism for two years and pre-K for one year and all the rest have been high school English.

I have published a teacher’s guide for the epic poem Beowulf (PDF) and have an article in the July 2006 issue of English Journal — “Toward ‘Moral Perfection’: Integrating Judaic Concepts and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.” You can learn more about my work experience by viewing my résumé.

Responsibilities

My responsibilities at the Weber School include teaching English and advising our chapter of the National Honor Society. I am also adviser for a small group of seniors. I currently teach British Literature and Composition to 11th graders at two levels and a 9th grade Grammar, Composition, and Literature course at two levels. First semester, I teach a senior elective called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is modeled on the work of Joseph Campbell. Second semester, I teach a Writing Seminar course to 10th graders.

My Technology

At work, I have a Windows desktop running Microsoft XP.  I use Firefox as my default browser and have Microsoft Office 2007.  I have a SMART interactive whiteboard running version 10 of the SMART Board Notebook software.  I use Roxio CinePlayer to show DVD’s on my SMART Board.  My room is fitted with a ceiling-mounted projector.  I have access to two computer labs, which are similarly outfitted, though the lab has a Promethean ActivBoard (which I have never used), and some computers are running older versions of Office.  I use Google Apps mail for my school e-mail.

My personal computer is a MacBook with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor running OS X 10.6.2.  I use Firefox 3.5.6 and Apple’s native mail client for my grad school e-mail account and Gmail for my personal e-mail account.  I have Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. I use Things for GTD and I’m growing quite fond of Curio for planning, taking notes, and research. I use Gimp to edit images, and I use Keynote to create presentations.

I also have a 16 GB iPhone 3G with a growing number of apps that I also use for GTD (and fun!).

Texts I Use

My school has adopted the Prentice Hall series at two levels.  Our College Prep level uses Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes, Gold Level and our College Prep 2 (CP2) level uses Prentice Hall Literature: The Penguin Edition, and our College Prep (CP) level uses Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes.  I use their British Tradition texts at each level.  These texts include excerpts from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales as well as the entire text of Macbeth in The British Tradition and Romeo and Juliet in the 9th grade texts.  My 11th grade students also use Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference.  My 9th graders are still using the tried and true (but out of print) Warriner’s Grammar and Composition: Third Course (the little green grammar book) and Writer’s Inc. (CP2).  These texts are all non-consumable, but most of our texts, including all the novels we read, are consumable texts.  Selections vary, but this year, I plan to teach the following:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (11th CP)
• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (11th CP2)
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (11th CP and CP2)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (11th CP)
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (11th CP2)
• The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (12th Hero)
• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers (12th Hero)
• The Iliad by Homer (12th Hero)
• Star Wars (Episodes 4-6) (12th Hero)
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (12th Hero)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (12th Hero)
• Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (12th Hero)
• The Ramayana (12th Hero)
• The Odyssey by Homer (9th CP and CP2)
• A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (9th CP and CP2)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (9th CP2)
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (9th CP)
• A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker (10th WS)

This Site

This site is powered by WordPress 2.9 and hosted by Bluehost.  I utilize a theme called Cutline, which is available in many varieties. I have the following plugins, which all do various things to help me run my site:

• Add to Any: Allows users to save and share content easily.
• Akismet: Anti-spam plugin native to WordPress.
• Anarchy Media Player: Embeds media into your posts (Note: I am not sure the plugin author intends to keep developing this plugin, as it’s been updated sporadically and slowly).
• AntiLeech: Purports to prevent others from stealing content and bandwidth.
• Apture: Makes my site more interactive by allowing me to embed content.
• Automatic Timezone: Allows me to display the correct timezone without having to make changes for Daylight Saving Time.
• Bad Behavior: Prevents spambots from accessing my site.
• Contact Form 8: Allows me to create simple contact forms.
• Feedburner Feedsmith: Redirects my RSS feed to Feedburner, which will help me track my feed’s stats.
• Now Reading Reloaded: Enables me to share my current reading projects in the sidebar and also easily retrieve Amazon images for book covers.
• Photo Dropper: Enables me to search Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr and automatically insert them in my posts.
• Related Posts: Retrives posts related to my current post; particularly useful for new visitors who haven’t read my older posts.
• RSS Footer: Places copyright information in the RSS feed of my posts.
• SimpleTagsPlus: My older posts are tagged using Technorati with this plugin; I now use WordPress’s native tagging system, but I keep the plugin enabled so that the tags on my older posts will still work.
• Subscribe to Comments: Enables readers to subscribe to comments so they are updated when new comments are posted to an article or comment thread in which they are interested.
• TinyMCE Advanced: Allows me to do more on the backend of posting with HTML, CSS, and other controls without having to look up code.
• Twitter Tools: When I began using Twitter, I wanted a nice clean way to display my last few tweets in the sidebar.  RSS could work, but I didn’t think it looked nice, so I installed this plugin.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags: I embed YouTube videos all the time, and I was getting tired of switching back and forth from the Visual (WYSIWYG) editor to the HTML editor just to get Anarchy Media Player to work, and it doesn’t look like that project will be updated any longer, so I decided to install this handy plugin, which enables me to embed a YouTube video quickly and easily.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade: Makes it easier for me to upgrade WordPress when new versions are released.
• WordPress Database Backup: Backs up my database in case I or someone else breaks my site.
• WP Odeo: Enables me to embed Odeo players into my posts.  Since installing this plugin, I have noticed a decline in Odeo’s usefulness; this plugin hasn’t been updated in a long time (I don’t think it has needed to be updated), but I believe I have a couple of posts with Odeo files embedded, so I keep it around.
• WP Polls: Enables me to poll readers.
• WP Print: Produces a printer-friendly version of my posts and pages.
• WP Subscriber Info: Enables me to view a few stats on comment subscriptions.