Category: Teaching English
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Teaching Whole Class Novels
I have been thinking about how many novels and Shakespeare plays I have taught over the years. Most English teachers I know LOVE to teach novels. This is where we shine, and we want to start immediately. Before a school year begins, we consider how many novels we can fit into the curriculum. What do…
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Teaching Literature: Nurturing Empathy and Knowledge through Challenging Texts
When I was teaching AP Literature, we would read around seven books in one year. All of these books were classics, and not always full of cheer. Sometimes my students would question, why are we reading books that are such downers? Not all the books I taught in my other classes were classics, but they…
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Love of Cormac McCarthy
I was first introduced to Cormac McCarthy’s novels in college. We read All The Pretty Horses, and his writing style is a little complex at first. He does not use much punctuation, no quotation marks, or commas. A Pulitzer Prize winner can do what he wants, right? He disliked using semicolons or exclamation points. To…
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Okonkwo’s Pride in Things Fall Apart
I am writing about identify again today. These thoughts are from when I taught Things Falls Apart by Chinua Achebe (touted as one of the 100 Books ever written) to my AP Literature students. I always started the year with this book. It is unusual, divergent, and exotic all combined into one. Most students have…
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Expand a Sentence
I think one of the hardest concepts of creative writing for students who don’t want to be writers is teaching them how to be descriptive and “showing” versus “telling”. Most of them will only write one creative story a year and possibly some smaller assignments. So, how do I get the “most” out of them…
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The Devil and Tom Walker
What is it like to move for three months? That’s what we did. My husband took a coaching job at Southern Virginia University, so we are in Virginia for three months. I really enjoy exploring my surroundings wherever I go, and the first morning I laced up my running shoes and took off to explore…
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Understanding Literature Settings
Today I was preparing a lesson for my students in my dual enrollment literature class on setting in literature. For years, I have kept different journals where I write down quotes and passages from books I read that I enjoy or have some impact on me and many of them are on setting. In Wired…