What Is Love?

I was a bit less impressed by Kirklighter’s article than my one classmate who already posted on Freire.  My first reaction is one of mild displeasure that a term as important as “liberatory dialogue” isn’t overtly defined.  I can read between the lines and develop my own working definition of the practice, but with something [...]

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Mini-Blog #2: Everyone Hates a Discount!

I suppose I was at a bigger disadvantage than many.  My parents were divorced and remarried, and of the four people in my life who had “dad” or “mom” someplace in their title, none of them had gone to college.  I knew that I was going to college, but I didn’t know what college was—and [...]

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Mini-Blog #1: The Other Half of Teaching

I am posting this week’s blogs in two truncated segments to align with the two articles that I am responsible for during the coming week; I figured this would be a good pedestal to begin my discussion of them.
 
Finders’ article has a relevance to it that goes well beyond the mere pedagogy he’s promoting.  In [...]

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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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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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individuality; random thoughts

I was thinking today at the school where I teach that the only way to really help students to be individuals is to model acceptance and compassion for others.  I think the way to true individuality is to break down the barriers that make us think of “others” as “others” and instead to start thinking [...]

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Yagleski = Conformist

Yagleski is a traitor. Perhaps I read the essay wrong or I became too invested in it because I teach English, but I found his words appalling. While I love that he noted how vital English education is to the community at large and that he also noted that English education is the most [...]

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