Inevitable product placement...too much?

This past week I was teaching a lesson on creating and writing persona based poetry to my high school creative writing class (as a volunteer) when the unthinkable happened: I was explaining that John Berryman created three distinct voices or personas, one of which is a character named Mr. Bones, who speaks in Minstrel dialect. Except I didn’t say Minstrel. I said menstrual. Repeatedly and with hand motions.

See I’ve always had problems with pronunciation, especially with words that I read often in books but never have reason (or confidence) to use in conversation.  What happens is I go to use a word that I know to be correct and proper for what I want to say and then completely botch how it’s supposed to be said. It’s like character names – Harry Potter’s Hermione for example, I mangled that name for years. Or a better example is the word invalid, as in a person who is sickly, but for years I was saying IN-VAAH-LID instead of IN-VUH-LID. I was corrected, slightly incredulously by the father of an ex-boyfriend  during a very heated debate.

But anyways, there I am saying menstrual and flapping my hands around for emphasis and seeing the horror on the faces of my students but thinking, of course,  it’s in reaction to the use of Minstrel dialect in poetry when I hear a slight cough behind me and then my name. I look back at Mr. Creasman, the teacher of this fifth period class and he says: 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.

I’ve been teaching third graders through EWU’s Writers in the Community program, and over the course of our year together, I’ve discovered something: kids watch too much TV.

For example: I decided, a few weeks ago, to mix things up and have the kids write jokes instead of poems or short stories.  Most of them preferred the knock-knock variety.  A lot of them I’d heard before (knock-knock!  who’s there?  boo!  boo hoo?  you don’t need to cry about it!) but there was one that seemed new to me, until I saw the TV commercial from which the student had stolen it… Read more »