ISO: Plural Commons

Yancey begins her essay with mentioning Alaska, and of course I spent the remainder of my reading time devoted to seeing Sarah Palin’s name somewhere in the text. I was grossly disappointed by the sad lack of Palinisms within the text, and actually, I don’t know if I was disappointed by the text as a [...]

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Making the abstract concrete

I have to admit that for me Berlin’s book was at times a struggle to read.  He seemed rather boring and occasionally difficult to grasp- perhaps because I am not that interested in rhetoric which he mainly discusses as being central to English studies.  However, I did find the second half of the book somewhat more [...]

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Fact or Fiction: Length Doesn’t Matter?

Let me tell you about the days when I feel most like a failure of an English teacher.  They are typically centered around literature—the canon, because our syllabus knows no other option.  These texts are challenging: Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, and Macbeth are the only three mentioned by name in the twelfth grade curriculum.  Apart from [...]

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No Satisfaction

I’m sorry, James Berlin. I’m sure you’re amazingly smart (maybe too smart, just maybe, for my little poetic mind to fully appreciate), but I seriously cannot get into your book. And I’m not sure what it is about your writing that makes want to continually shut the book, put it down, and walk far, far [...]

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Lost in Berlin

Reading the first half of Berlin’s book was a mixed experience for me.  Overall, I found his work somewhat boring and at times, confusing.  Also, at first I was not quite sure I agreed with what he seemed to be saying about English studies being related to politics and how students are to be trained to cope [...]

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Focus

Part of teaching English is helping students develop strategies to stay on task with their reading, especially when they’re reading something that they’re not particularly interested in. One of my favorites (though I’ve not yet taught it and quite frankly, have a difficult time using it for my own reading processes) is the funnel. Using [...]

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In other words…

Did anyone else notice that he said that a lot? The man is generous with his transitions…
Anyway, at first I decided that I was not going to like Berlin and this book. He seemed, well, snobby in Chapter 1. However, by the second chapter I began to like him much more, maybe because I understood [...]

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Confession of an Arrogant Snob

In the next seventy-two hours, fifty sophomores in the Fleetwood School District will be finishing up the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I have found the book to be a tough sell in the beginning, with greater success as the action intensifies.  I enjoy the book a lot—particularly everything it has to say—but I’ve [...]

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