2020… Come on in! The Water’s Fine: School Reform Begins with Me by Sheryl Lain 5 May 20206 May 2020 When I was a kid, I could not bring my toes to release their hold on the lip of the high dive, even though my girlfriend pressed me forward, begging…
2020… Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Cautionary Tale of Totalitarian Ideology by Shahin Hossain 5 May 20206 May 2020 In Texts and Pretexts, first published in 1932, while discussing his concern regarding the present and future, Aldous Huxley asserted, “Personally, I must confess, I am more interested in what…
2020… The Over-Simplified Guide to Creating Courses, Unit Plans, & Lessons by Jean Prokott 5 May 2020 Congratulations! You get to write your own course. What happens next? Here’s a list of ten steps that will make this whole process look a lot easier than it is:…
2020… Becoming THAT Teacher—An Account of One Year of Teaching by Kasden Watson 5 May 20206 May 2020 Like many, I believed that crossing the threshold of the downward ramp, and passing my tassel, meant that I was a full-blown teacher. I had graduated, and amidst the roar…
2020… #ReadingWars and Equity by Allison Sirovy 5 May 20206 May 2020 Following the #ReadingWars on social media? If you are, you may feel like me—lost and confused. Although I teach middle school English, reading instruction is near and dear to my…
2020… Fibonacci Spiral, or Why Four Middle Schoolers Are Enough by Sheryl Lain 5 May 2020 A Fibonacci spiral follows the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, etc., where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it; pineapples, starfish, sunflower…
2020… “Cool” Theft: AAVE Appropriation as a Tool of White Hegemony by Anna Lehn 5 May 2020 The 1940s archival footage may be grainy, but the big band and its lead singer, Helen O’Connell, are lily white. Her blond perm, powdered nose, and demure blouse pop in…
2020… Didn’t I See That Before?: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” Seen in Saw & Saw IV by T. Madison Peschock 5 May 20206 May 2020 For the past decade, the humanities have been on the decline, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) courses have been on the rise. As recent as February 2020, InsideHigher…
2020… Shoes, Rap Music, and Guns: Transitional Objects as Objective Correlatives in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone by Tanya Stafsholt Miller 5 May 2020 When a person has gone through extreme trauma, writing about it can have a healing effect. The act of shaping the words on a page puts the trauma outside the…
2020… “It’s Not the Teacher’s Job”: Talking About Death and Death-Related Grief with Picture Books in Classrooms by Jongsun Wee and Heather J. Fye 5 May 2020 Introduction Death was not taboo in children’s literature before the 20th century (Clement and Jamali 5), but its presence disappeared from after World War I to the 1970s in Western…
2020… What Matters in the Classroom? A Pre-Survey by Jean Prokott 5 May 20206 May 2020 (Download a .docx version of this survey here) Below are various factors that make a successful classroom. Please rank them in the order of which you think is most important…
2020… Three Poems by Jean Prokott 5 May 20206 May 2020 BIRTH And at night, Uncle Duane would sleep with the upstairs window open in the farmhouse, let the wet, August night saturate the sheets and listen for the gurgling cries…