Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

A student climbs a tree on Earth Day Today was Earth Day!  A joyous reason for me to act like a hippie and for that to be socially acceptable, and so I took full advantage of the situation.  Oh, and it is nearing the end of National Poetry Month, and it is Hump Day and the kids have been working hard, so what better reason to celebrate? I teach high school, three periods a day of English.  English is one of those classes that every one has to take (and pass) four years in a row in order to graduate.  I feel that it is my duty to make my classes as applicable to my students' lives as possible, to help them, through reading and writing, learn to think and communicate.  I also feel that the nature of my class gives me the leeway to get to know my students in ways that other teachers may not be able to--after all, through our writing and sharing as we connect to literature, we learn a lot about one another. And so yesterday, I realized that my students an...

View Finder Haiku Today, in celebration of National Poetry Month, I challenged my AP (Advanced Placement) Literature and Composition students to the 'ku challenge, described in detail on my poetry blog  here . For this activity, I briefly introduced the haiku genre using the material linked above, asking students to share what they already know about this poetic form, activating background knowledge and also effectively helping other students catch up on their poetry knowledge. Then, I had students choose a viewfinder from the front table.  A viewfinder is useful in art because it helps to focus a student's perspective.  I have collected a ton of paint samples with little squares cut out, and I finally found a use for these items.  They worked perfectly as viewfinders! We were originally going to walk outside, but it started raining.  So, like all teachers will have to do, I had to think quickly of a plan b, which evolved into plan c and d and, w...

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 ...

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 ...

Reading Response to Palmer’s The Courage to Teach I had plenty of courage my first year teaching in 2001--pictured here, I am wearing my Spirit Week Tacky Day attire! My Mentor:   Mrs. Dr. Eggers “The best gift we receive from great mentors is not their knowledge or their approval or their approach to teaching but the sense of self they evoke within us.”             Dr. Eggers is prim and proper, a short elfin woman with pixie hair and the quiet capacity to intimidate even the biggest football player, the toughest “tough” guy.   Most vividly, I recall her classy demeanor, the way she carried herself with such self-respect; therefore both demanding it from and giving it to others.   She came off as superiorly intelligent, but she didn’t brag about her intellect.   But she wasn’t squeaky clean, either.   She was quirky—always wearing big chunky jewelry from the many interesting places she’d vis...