My Year in Flip-Flops

New Media Literacy and Motivation

2008-06-24T02:48:18Z

Some ideas after being assigned to read an article by David O'Brien: The traditional meaning of “literate” is situated in print based texts. Students who struggle with print based text are perceived as “at-risk” or in need of “remediation,...

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Complementary Reading

2008-06-23T01:57:28Z

Content area teachers, or even language arts and reading teachers, are often bound by time, inexperience and budget to assign textbook reading to students. Textbooks, however, can be limited in possibilities for differentiation in readability, s...

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Bidialectical Dictionaries

2008-06-22T02:22:14Z

Lisa Delpit, in her article "Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction: What Should Teachers Do?", reminds us that language learning is different than reading comprehension. If an answer comes our way in nonstandard English, but accurately ...

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WebQuests as Literacy Strategy

2008-06-22T02:18:40Z

WebQuest or Internet Busy Work? Bernie Dodge from San Diego State University is widely credited with having created the concept of WebQuests in 1995. In the past decade or so, educators have generated criteria that differentiate an authentic W...

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The Ridiculous Affirmation I Find in Italics and Parentheses

2008-06-17T02:34:01Z

I'm not ashamed to admit I have purposefully taught inanities such as "topic sentences," or "the 17 rules of comma usage." Oh, the certainty of writing -1 in the margin of an essay. How adult I felt, smoking Camel Lights and drinking iced coffee ...

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English Teacher Too Eager to Accept Resolution

2008-06-15T01:42:26Z

Maybe it's because I love the lecture I give on basic plot structure, my unoriginal yet endearingly dorky metaphor of Protagonist Bill climbing Plot Mountain. "In the end, there's always resolution," I tell my students. "It may not always be a ha...

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Rainy Day Reflections on My Sabbatical as It Ends

2008-05-29T14:36:47Z

I'm feeling like it's over. June is upon us next week, my husband is wound up like teachers always are at this time of year, and my kindergarten son is ripping a link off his paper chain every morning. My sabbatical work isn't done. I have one m...

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A Pedagogy of Interiority

2008-04-28T16:32:29Z

This is a placeholder post because I don't have time to fully think about this right now. I came across this idea of a pedagogy of interiority while listening to a podcast interview with Irish poet John O'Donahue. He was being interviewed about ...

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An Excerpt from a Paper I'm Writing (worth thinking about if you're a teacher...)

2008-04-04T22:07:45Z

Now that I find myself closer to 40 than 30, closer to veteran than novice, I realize that I stand on the far side of a generational divide. When I started teaching, I may have bumped into my students at concerts, or watched the same TV shows...

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Influenza!, or March in Minnesota

2008-04-03T15:27:09Z

You know you're Minnesotan if you feel compelled to say out loud "at least no one died," but secretly you think if someone had died, at least people would bring casseroles and there would be some possibility of cathartic emotion. Instead, there ...

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