With finals going currently, here are some thoughts on novels, stories, and plays I used in my classroom over the last school year. It’s always interesting to experience something as a student and then as a teacher. Take Heart of Darkness: the dialogue is richer than what I remember from high school, and the novel is …
Continue reading The Great, the Good, and the OK: Texts I Taught This Year
This weekend Leah and I have lived in North Carolina for a year. There are many things I could reflect upon, given the anniversary, but when I think back, what comes most to mind is rejection. Now, things a year ago with Leah were going great—she wasn’t the one rejecting me. And things with the …
Continue reading One Year in North Carolina (or: How I Got a Job After 90 Rejections)
Last weekend our school received an enormous donation of books. So I spent the afternoon with members of the National Honor Society and Beta Club boxing up the haul and loading them into a horse trailer. On the side note of high school students, when all was said and done they took out sheets of …
Continue reading Gigantic Book Donation (Or, What Books Were Bestselling 1960-Present?)
Last Wednesday was my school’s fifth snow day of the school year. For students this is a cause for celebration, though for teacher’s, a headache. It’s a pretty good illustration, I believe, of different long-term thinking abilities—students aren’t considering that we’ll now have a total of five days tacked onto the end of the school …
In a few hours Leah and I are hosting book club, which happens to be on St. Patrick’s Day. This is the same book club that had a Shakespeare party a while back, and it’s a great group of people. Originally book club was a few weeks ago, but none of us had finished the …
Today I’m going to talk about my favorite grammatical mark—the dash. It’s my opinion that people don’t use dashes enough. Perhaps this is because dashes are seen as old-fashioned, or perhaps because people don’t quite understand them. On the old-fashioned front, I get it; read English texts from the past and authors throw around dashes …
Leah gave me a skull for Valentine’s Day. To be clear, Leah isn’t strange for giving it to me, and in fact, I don’t think I’m strange for wanting it. Earlier the skull caught my eye because I’m an English teacher and soon I’ll be teaching “Hamlet.” This is the play where Hamlet picks up …
Continue reading In Brief: Alas, Poor Yorick! (Valentine’s Present)
Over the weekend Leah and I attended a Shakespeare Party. It was a lot of fun and yes, I hear you groaning, and yes, this is what English teachers do. We didn’t sit around and read Shakespeare, but we did wear name tags with Shakespeare quotes on them, ate food from a Shakespearean cookbook, and …
Last week The Drabble accepted a short story I wrote. You can read it here, though to be accurate I shouldn’t really say “short story.” The Drabble is a website that publishes works of prose and poetry 100 words or less—works of “flash fiction.” My piece was inspired by students who have recently been making …
Continue reading Publication: Edgar Allan Poe “Story” in “The Drabble”
In August of 2017 I bit my bottom lip while eating food, hard. Biting my lip isn’t typically a memorable experience since it happens every-so-often. This bite, however, was a bite that will live in infamy because it’s led to me having surgery twice. And that’s silly, because I’m not sure why it’s even possible …
