This time of year, most of us are looking for signs of spring – light green buds on the willow tree, yellow blooms of daffodils and forsythia. For those of us who live in climates where the beauty of winter becomes gray and dreary by March, April brings the promise of warmer temperatures and vibrant…
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A Gem of a Poem: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
The change of seasons is an ideal time to assign creative writing, especially poetry. Connecting feelings with themes of change and hope can inspire even the most reluctant student to take a chance at waxing poetic. While each season has natural changes to anticipate, something about sighting the first flowers of spring makes anyone smile…
Using Art in the English classroom
Are you stuck for a different writing prompt for your students? I love to visit art museums, and on a recent weekend trip to Boston, I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I find that I am drawn paintings with light used in surprising or unusual ways. In the painting above, similar to one…
The Red Wheelbarrow: A Gem of a Poem
William Carlos Williams’s poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” takes a quaint, domestic scene and turns it into a metaphor. A metaphor of what? That is up to the reader. When teaching in New York City many years ago, a colleague used this poem as a springboard for students to write short poems centered around an object…
A Gem of a Poem: Mother to Son
“Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes I often see requests from teachers for short poems that demonstrate various poetic techniques. Whether for a quick bell ringer lesson, an intro to a longer unit, or a variation on a theme in a longer work, short poems are excellent tools for teachers to have in their toolboxes.…
Inspiration for Teachers
The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy I remember reading Pat Conroy’s The Water is Wide in graduate school, 30ish years ago, mesmerized by the narrator’s experiences as a new teacher in an unusual environment – an island off the coast of South Carolina that is nearly deserted and seemingly forgotten by the mainland. The…
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” & Lois Lowry’s The Giver
These two texts are made for each other. Students enjoy reading them, teachers enjoy teaching them, and together they make for a lively class discussion. The setting of a futuristic, controlling society contrasts with a traditional, old fashioned town, and yet they are eerily similar. Students can analyze language, dialogue, and writing techniques. When in…
“The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jenga
For today’s Teacher Tuesday post, I suggest a combination of a board game and a short story, two of my favorite Perfect Pairings. Board games are the perfect tangible, concrete form to illustrate plot, conflict, resolution, consequences, setting, journey, and many more literary techniques. Board games are also affordable and readily available, and students can…
Beowulf, Grendel, & Toni Morrison
Among the questions in the teaching groups that I follow on social media, I often see requests for an essay or short work to tie in with either Beowulf or Grendel. I want to share a short essay that analyzes Grendel by John Gardner, which many high school teachers are tasked with teaching. In her…
