Oh my god, I love Catcher in the Rye. Seriously. Love it. Every time. I tried to explain to my students the other day why I loved it. They haven’t read it, so they were confused. “Is it about baseball?”… Read more ›
I love love LOVE this article about teaching Macbeth to junior high students that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago: Reading Shakespeare sounds like pandemonium. They take 10 minutes just to give out parts, one boy… Read more ›
For the past two years, I have asked my students to go on a quest through literature in my classes. They think of a time in their lives that they felt discriminated against or like an outcast. Then, they explain… Read more ›
Bitter is the New Black : Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office by Jen Lancaster My rating: 3 of 5 stars I checked out Jen Lancaster’s… Read more ›
Submissions are officially open for the seventh edition of the Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival! The theme for this month is Women in Literature, and it will be hosted by Our Feminist {Play} School. The deadline is December 20, so get… Read more ›
The Huffington Post ran a piece yesterday about the five books every high school student should read before going to college. It was a pretty good list, and I agree that most of those books are incredibly important for teenagers,… Read more ›
When a director and screenwriter team up to adapt a book to a full-length feature film, the results are often mixed. The complexity of well-written stories often makes it difficult to do them justice in the span of a couple… Read more ›
You may not have noticed from all of the posts on this blog, but it’s Banned Books Week! You all saw my awesome bulletin board to celebrate the week. My students have all seen it, too, and they are outraged… Read more ›
I am ridiculously proud of this. Check out all of my Banned Books Week 2012 posts here! Related PostsTeaching Tolerance: Keeping Students Strong While We Stop Bullies Do Politics Belong in the Classroom? Apollo 13 and Our Educational System
It’s Banned Books Week! This is literally my favorite week of the year. We just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 and my students are excited to start reading some banned books of their own. (I, of course, suggested a few of my… Read more ›
I’m over at Care2.com today talking about 7 classic dystopian novels that are great to recommend (or teach!) to teens after they’ve read The Hunger Games. This is particularly important now that the first video is out on DVD. Even if… Read more ›
I just started teaching Fahrenheit 451 with my honors English classes, and I’m so excited to be rereading talking about it. There are so many themes that are incredibly pertinent to our time. It never ceases to amaze me that this… Read more ›
If you are even remotely close to my age (i.e. pushing 30), you probably know a little bit about the Gilmore Girls. If you know even a little about the Gilmore Girls, you know that Rory – my teenage idol… Read more ›
I’m on the Ms. Magazine Blog today, reviewing Julia Alvarez’s A Wedding in Haiti for your reading pleasure: Feminist novelist Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies), known for her clear, unaffected… Read more ›
Hey Chifems! Remember, we are meeting on 4/1 to talk about As Always, Julia! Hope to see you there! 1. These women are both pioneers in a feminist sense. Are they considered feminist icons? Why/not? 2. In the introduction, we… Read more ›
Someone recently tweeted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heartwarming list of things he wanted his daughter, Scottie, to worry about and things he wanted her not to worry about. As I have just finished reading The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (a… Read more ›
Well, folks, the contest play is over. It’s bittersweet in that we didn’t do as well as I had hoped we would, but I am glad to have more time on my hands, especially now that the weather is getting… Read more ›
The first show I ever directed was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I was living in a small community, much different than the suburban sprawl where I grew up and the urban pulse of the city I frequented, so I found… Read more ›
If you’ve been a good Chifem, you’ve been reading The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht! Hopefully you’re finished or almost there, because we are meeting on Sunday, January 22 (check the link for place and time) for an in-person discussion.… Read more ›
I fell in love with literature at a very young age. I loved books so much, I wanted to create them, because I wanted to give readers the same joy many authors had given me. Then, I grew up a… Read more ›