Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

Poetic Inquiry:  Hello Kitty--A Feminist (symbol)? Dressed as HK to share my poem with my AP students I n response to Dr. Sandra L. Faulkner's  Hello Kitty Goes to College: Poems about Harassment  in the Academy , and after reading a lot about poetic inquiry as a method of qualitative research, including the book  Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences ,  I wrote the following research(ed) poem in response.  I had the honor of presenting this poem to my cohort of scholars in the doctoral program at Appalachian State, and my professor skyped Dr. Faulkner so that she was present for my performative enactment.  It was an amazing experience to share my work with the woman who inspired it, a person who is helping pave the way for poetics in research and women in academia, and she was so kind and encouraging. Hello Kitty Talks Back Thank you, Dr. Faulkner for giving me voice when I had none, for unsilencing me [I was NOT an elective mute],

What Is Comprehensible Input? Comprehensible Input Is… Communication made clear --it’s all about comprehension-- & Can be achieved by: --enunciating --speaking more s-l-o-w-l-y --reducing the complexity of speech with simple sentence structures (subject-verb-object)   “You circle the answer” NOT “Circle the correct answer.   Only choose one.   Eliminate some answer choices” –at least not for beginners OR CONFUSION ensues! --avoiding idioms --paraphrasing (say it another way) --repetition --oral and written directions (crystal clear expectations) modeled, step-by-step --teaching homographs & homophones, synonyms & cognates --using multimedia, gestures, body language, pictures,  & objects --previewing material --providing graphic organizers, taped texts, & sentence strips Comprehensible input is --repeated exposure --in a variety of ways --in a variety of contexts Comprehensible I

Word Cloud of Poetic (re)Presentation of Plath made by B. Faulkner using Tagul "Plath's Last Supper": A Villanelle Exploration I grew fascinated with Sylvia Plath, always a favorite poet of mine, and read as much of her work as I could find, including The Bell Jar, followed by the reading of several biographies and books of literary criticism. I also love writing poetry that adheres to forms, as much as free verse is my natural voice and style, so it follows that I wrote my musings on Plath's life in this style, a rigid French form consisting of five tercets and a quatrain in which "t he first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as:  A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2 " ( Poets.o