Nancie Atwell was mentioned in several books on reading in the English classroom. She has done a lot of writing on reading workshops and how to get our students reading and falling in love with reading. My wife happened to have this book from her teacher preparation program days and a gladly lent it to me. I’ve really wanted to get my students to fall in love with reading again. It seems like there’s a sad break in reading in our national educational system. In […]
The English Teacher’s Guide to the Galaxy
Finally, a book about teaching English by an actual English teacher! OK, hyperbole aside, I do value the insights Kelly Gallagher put into his book, Deeper Reading. He addresses many of the issues that I have had with teacher preparation programs. The colleges and universities give you tons of theory and concepts, which are valuable and give teaching a credible background of research and knowledge, but it doesn’t tell you what to do when you’re faced with teaching The Scarlet Letter to Juniors on Monday. […]
Eggers does it again — a face-to-face sit down with society’s failings
Stylistically, Eggers’ newest novel is a total departure from all of his earlier ventures, as it is entirely a set of dialogues between a disturbed young man named Thomas and his various abductees, all of them being held at an abandoned military base not far from the town he grew up in along the California coast. But Fathers is fundamentally a morality play transplanted into the 21st century and, as such, is not unlike his earlier novels such as Hologram for the King and The […]
The Common Core Is Coming! The Common Core Is Coming!
Technically, the Common Core is already here, but in case one did not know, the saturation of “Common Core aligned” notices on various workbooks, vocabulary texts, and the deluge of Common Core-themed texts on the market would make that announcement clear enough. Anxious parents, and even more anxious and novice teachers, will soon scan these shelves to buy these Common Core-themed texts in the desperate hope that they will be enlightened. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher’s Rigorous Reading: 5 Access Points for Comprehending Complex Texts (2014) is […]