Category Archives: Reflections on Teaching and Learning
Highlights from the Seniors’ Blogs
Here are some exemplary blogs from Trimester 1 of the IB Higher Level year two class. Happy reading! Jordynn Lurie created a truly wonderful music video that combined many of the contradictions and equivocations that the witches use Macbeth. It’s … Continue reading
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Tagged Education, English teaching, literature, Macbeth
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My Senior Speech
Welcome, Seniors, to your last English lecture, which will be the first in a long series of lasts. Welcome to exam limbo, a three week purgatorial drift. You will drift into school for exams, drift out for lunch. You’ll study … Continue reading
Posted in Reflections on Teaching and Learning
Tagged English, English teaching, Graduation, Senior Speech, teaching
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My Senior Speech
To my students in the class of 2013: Congratulations! You have just about finished your high school careers. Your airplane has landed, and we’re on the runway, making the taxi to the terminal. You may turn on your electronic devices … Continue reading
Students distracted by technology? Then teach better!
A good friend just shared a New York Times article about teachers struggling with technology. Or fighting against it. Or reluctantly using it to teach. The weird thing about the article, in my opinion, was its title: “Technology Changing How … Continue reading
Teaching Othello — Avoiding the Iago Effect
In his lecture to the Teaching Shakespeare Institute yesterday, Dr. Michael Whitmore described a recent conversation. “In five minutes or less, explain to me why schools should teach Shakespeare,” someone asked him. In reply, he picked on play that has … Continue reading
Why English? How English?
Lately I’ve tried to put myself inside the head of a student — NOT one who wants to grow up and be an English teacher, but one of the many busy, distracted, and bored young men or women who have … Continue reading
Mr. Parsons’ senior speech
To my students in the class of 2012: Congratulations! You have reached the last class of your High School English careers. I hope that you have found our year together rewarding and fun… and above all, I hope that you … Continue reading
All Quiet on the Western Front — Chapters 6-7
In today’s class students worked in seven different small groups. Each group moved through the room, stopping at a different passage from chapter 6 or 7 from All Quiet on the Western Front. Each group annotated their own passage and wrote … Continue reading
A Year in the Life of an English Class 