I didn’t want to share my feelings about Kathryn Stockett’s The Help because I felt others, like Roxane Gay have done it better than I could and also because I have no intention of seeing the movie, so I have no valid opinion there. But when Sam Ligon asked me twice I decided to say how I felt once and for all and be done with it. Sorry for being long winded.

I went to elementary school in Germantown, Maryland and later in Teaneck, New Jersey, both pretty liberal towns . My mother, though, never completely trusted the public education system and so I spent many summers doing book reports on books like The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas and The Story of George Washington Carver. I was able to label all of the African countries when The Democratic Republic of the Congo was still known as Zaire.  When I was old enough my mother encouraged me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X , an eye-opening book that made me wary of swallowing everything I was learning in school because Malcolm X was labelled as a radical  but he had in fact died wanting peace between Muslims and Christians.

I remember once being surprised by something I found in my history text book that I pointed it out to my mother. Read more »

This site has a plethora of lessons, exercises, and activities for K-12 reading and writing teachers.

After reading Laura’s last post about what she learned from teaching third graders, I thought I’d do a shameless plug for one of my favorite websites, ReadWriteThing.org.

(Disclaimer: I write for this site, so I may be a little biased, but I don’t think so. It really is one of the best professional sites for language arts teachers. One reason I’m sure of this is because of the process I go through as a writer of lessons and activities for the site. Everything is peer-reviewed, so once I write a lesson and turn it in, it goes to a professional teacher/writer in the field for review. Then it comes back to me with notes for revision–unless I’m having a really good day and they think my work is brilliant–at which time I make revisions and corrections before turning it in for final approval. It’s quite a process, but it’s worth it because the material on the site ends up being top quality.)

Anyhow, I was also thinking about all the writers in MFA programs out there doing service in schools like we do at Eastern with Writers in the Community. They should definitely know about this site. It’s super easy to navigate, and you can search for anything from handouts and activities to complete units that will last weeks. It’s something all reading and writing teachers should know about, even those at the college level because many of the high school level lessons can easily be adapted for college students. So if any of you are teachers or thinking of going into teaching after you graduate, I highly recommend this site.