Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

Lesson Introduction The following is an assignment I like to use in my English classes when watching clips from Freedom Writers   and teaching with the book.  I have successfully used this assignment with all manner of students in grades 9-12, and they all flourish from this type of focused reflection, while learning to be more articulate both orally and written, and while getting comfortable in front of a small live audience.  Not only do students love writing about themselves, they also enjoy the integration of media, and they learn how to write better essays as they transfer knowledge learned from their work writing effective speeches. Feel free to message me Common Core connections.  I know they exist, and I am quite admittedly being lazy with my alignment here.  But surely speaking is still an important skill?  I am only partly being tongue-in-cheek(y) here. Step 1.  Viewing.   Show all or part of Freedom Writers.   Be s...

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 ...

A Response to Spafford and Grosser’s “Controversial Theories” , A Chapter in  Dyslexia and Reading Difficulties : Research and Resource Guide for Working with all Struggling Readers (2005) What IS dyslexia?   Dyslexia--the Controversial Search for a "Cure"     Dyslexia reminds me of psoriasis, a genetic skin condition I suffer from, in that "often parents, teachers, and other concerned persons will search for miracle cures to relieve the reading disability of a dyslexic child” (Spafford & Grosser, 2005).     I am frequently approached by people with a magic cure for psoriasis although there is NO cure.  There are, however, medicines that treat my symptoms, that make my skin and my condition better as long as I stick with them.  Everyone has their pet whack cure--Vaseline, dead sea salts, etc. for this auto-immune system deficiency; much the same as dyslexia.   Because people with dyslexia, and their parents, are so in...

Using JSTOR's Teaching Resources In Your (English) Classroom It Started with an Email... I recently received an email from JSTOR announcing their new  Teaching Resources , an email I am so happy to have received!  I developed the curriculum for my AP Literature and Composition course, a senior English class, last spring, and in several units, I linked to JSTOR as a resource.  The only caveat:  in order for students (or you) or me to access the articles, you have to register for free AND you can only have three articles on your book shelf at a time AND of course there is a limit to how often you can switch these articles out.  Although students found it tricky at times to get registered and to add items to their bookshelves, these articles are an amazing resource in a course asking students to learn to do some heavy thinking, thinking about and with literature in ways they never knew possible, especially given that I created my own online "textbook" using H...

http://www.ltl.appstate.edu/prodlearn/prodlearn/summer_2007/Faulkner_Bobbi/art3.html Using I Poems to Teach Poetry, Literacy, and a Sense of Place to English Language Learners Context Then: This unit was created as partial fulfillment for RE 5130, Teaching the  Language Arts, with Dr. Beth Frye as I worked towards my masters in Reading Education K-12 at Appalachian State University.  With this project, we were introduced to the idea of using poetry to explore other content areas.  I am a lover of poetry, so I was enthused by this novel way of integrating poetry into content.  The focus of my communication skills class, a locally required class for 10th graders, is writing, mainly informational and research writing.  As soon as I was given this assignment, I began to think of ays to integrate the two types of writing we had been studying into the poetry unit.  The informational writing component of the course id geared to the NC 10th Grade Writing Te...