If you teach English, get this book! If you follow me on Twitter or have read through some of my previous blog posts, you probably know I’m a huge fan of #TeachLivingPoets. In fact, I’m not exaggerating even a little when I say the #TeachLivingPoets community has revolutionized the way I teach poetry. I cannot…
Sid, who tweets @ThatTeacherSid on Twitter, posted the following tweet a few days ago: https://twitter.com/ThatTeacherSid/status/1330169233377009664 I need to do some work on my dissertation, so I’m hoping a reply here on my blog will limber me up for writing. Is that possibly a form of procrastination? Maybe, but here are my recommendations, and you might…
I’ve been a little bit frustrated by my first unit in AP Lit. since my first year teaching it. Since this year is my fourth, it was time to make some changes or scrap it altogether, and since I felt it had some real potential, I decided to rethink the selections I was using to…
It has been a little while since I posted about professional reading here. I picked up Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana at the suggestion of colleagues at my school. This is one of those books, sort of like Understanding by Design, that makes such a clear,…
I’ve been meaning to get around to starting independent reading in my classroom for years. Honest. But like so many things I’ve been “meaning” to do, I put it off. I did finally buy Penny Kittle’s Book Love back in June, and I fully intended to read it. It is true that I had a…
The post on chapters 1 and 2 has been up over a week with very little activity in the comments. I think folks are busy going back to school and perhaps don’t have the time they thought they might have to engage in an online book club. I have so much I must read to…
I apologize for not getting this first post up sooner. I have been having some problems with my blog. I just installed a plugin that I hope will help prevent some of the slowness and page load issues you might have noticed. However, I used a similar plugin some years ago, and it totally messed…
I apologize for dragging my feet starting our study of Lehman and Roberts’s Falling in Love with Close Reading: Lessons for Analyzing Texts””and Life. I propose that we read the first two chapters this week and gather here to discuss them next Sunday, August 3. I know we’re butting up into the beginning of school…
I am asked often enough for recommendations of this sort of thing that I thought I’d share. Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe was the first truly useful and completely life-changing professional development book I read. I utterly altered the way I taught after reading it. It seems obvious to think about larger…
Thomas C. Foster’s excellent book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines elucidates literary analysis like no other text I have read. It clarifies the sometimes difficult task of interpretation and making meaning. It has an excellent recommended reading list, and it is indispensable for…
