UP, and enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee. It's Saturday. Yes, I'm sort of lazy this morning. It was a helluva busy and exhausting week. But in a few minutes, I'll get myself motivated-- there are things on my agenda that I want to get done. But I'm also going to make sure to put a little "me time" in there. It's all about balance. My AP Lit kids managed to engage in what is known as "productive struggle" this week-- and it worked. I wanted them to have to fight their way through an assignment (low stakes, but still a grade) and come out the other side being more competent. They were tasked with annotating T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Yeah, I'm that miserable *itch of a teacher. LOL It's rough going, to be sure. Then yesterday, I put them in pairs (no student input--work with whom you get) and assigned each pair a section of the poem to present an explication for, and they also had to answer four questions: what is the...
I was ten years old in 1976. The country was alight with Bicentennial Fervor; the quarters were minted with the dates, the dividing line on streets were painted with patriotic colors, school kids were given little plastic bags with a hole to hang them in the car that proclaimed "Keep America Beautiful!"-- it seemed we all had something to celebrate. And we wanted to. The country had just gone through the murky mess that Watergate brought, a president had resigned in disgrace, the Vietnam War had come to a brutal and difficult ending, and the country needed to heal. It had not even been a decade since the violence of 1968 with the riots and assassinations. We needed desperately to move forward, and we did, in so many ways. I sat on a grassy expanse of lawn behind one of the storied mansions in Newport and watched the Tall Ships come into harbor. It was breathtaking, exciting, and historic. In the ensuing 50 years, a lot has happened; much good has been accomplished and much t...
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