My students summarize, I want them to analyze. This is the battle I face every year. This comes out most often when they get their essays back. They are hoping that I recognized and rewarded their brilliance. But when I conference with students about their work, and we put their essay under a microscope, they … Continue Reading
I recently commented on a post in the Facebook group and had several people ask for directons, so I thought I would share on the site. Actually, I searched and was surprised that I haven’t shared Bookshaps here before. I decided to do BookSnaps after hearing my friend Sarah Soper excitedly talk about them. I was looking … Continue Reading
This post is written by Eric Rovie from Brookwood High School in the Atlanta area. While Eric framed these materials for an AP class, they will work for English classes in general. For more on Eric, check out his bio at the end of the post. In the AP Lit CED, Unit 4 is a … Continue Reading
My AP students enter my class having read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade… and that’s it. No Othello in 10th. No Julius Caesar. No Hamlet. It’s the hand I’m dealt and rather than lament this, I have to get to work building skill as quickly as I can. This isn’t an easy task because Shakespeare’s language … Continue Reading
There are a bunch of lines in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders” that have stayed with me ever since I discovered it a few years ago. Like many good poems, it takes something small and simple — a man is trying to cross the street in the rain while carrying his son — and turns … Continue Reading
If you could somehow transcribe the first poetry unit that I taught this year, the word that would appear most often would be “complex.” In each of my classes we define complexity as something that has things connected in complicated ways. We apply that definition to poetry, looking for the parts that connect to the … Continue Reading
