I don’t think there’s a more fun Shakespeare play to teach than Macbeth. It moves quickly (it’s one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays) and has it all: bloodshed, valor, all wrapped up in a play about what happens when the temptation to get what you want present itself. And it has witches! I
We all know the benefit of surrounding ourselves with others whom we can ask for advice. I’m fortunate to work with a bunch of English teachers who are terrific sounding boards for ideas. But it’s also good to take advantage of those who don’t work in my building. I’ve been
Sometimes the best lessons come not from great planning and preparation, but out of desperation and necessity. I had my students create their own essays prompts, and it definitely came from a spot where I felt like my back was up against the wall. However it was one of those
Nothing is worse than the sound of crickets in a classroom when you are trying to lead a discussion. This was the situation I faced last year with a couple of my classes. I created thought provoking discussion questions, asked them of the whole class, and was met with silence.
In the first episode of Bates Motel, Norman Bates and his mother hide a body in their hotel room. A couple of police officers come by unannounced, just looking things over. As you might expect the tension in the scene comes from whether or not the policemen will uncover the body.
Preschools are hubs of creativity. When my children were in preschool there wasn’t a day that went by that they didn’t bring home some piece of artwork they made. We accumulated a lot of paper rapidly. Once students get into high school, however, a lot of the creative activities that
I know Othello really well. I have taught it for the past fifteen years and can recite entire passages from memory. I have read extensively about it – everything from scholarly articles to blog posts – and have seen at least three different movie versions of it and a stage production. I
Most of my students don’t like to annotate, and it’s because teachers have made it that way. We’ve used annotation to turn reading into work – and unpleasant work at that. We all agree that annotation is a valuable skill, but too many of our students tell me that annotation
In a previous post I discussed the reasons why you should add free choice reading to your English class – even if you teach upper level AP classes like I do. There’s a good chance that over the course of their high school careers they have lost a lot of
