Self Reliance / Walden

We just finished up our block days so the following posts cover both Wednesday and Thursday classes.

 English 11 - We started off class by going over essays the students wrote on individual quotes from Emerson's "Self Reliance". Emerson's text can be difficult so breaking it up into pieces allowed us to harness the thought power of everyone in the room. We shared our writings and I provided some additional information so we could get at a better understanding of what Emerson's essay is all about. By the end, we managed to get to the core of Emerson's argument - society corrupts the individual and the individual succeeds based on her own merits. These two ideas are huge in American society and American literature and we see them repeated over and over in American films, TV shows, books, and political speeches. We spent most of the rest of the class looking at passages from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Walden recounts Thoreau's time spent following Emerson's advice - Thoreau lived on his own out in nature and survived off the fruits of his own labors. To get at the passages, we broke them up, wrote about them, shared in groups who read the same passage, and then taught others who had different passages. Doing the activity this way, allowed us to go over passages multiple time and get both breadth and depth with the selections. Over the course of our discussion, we reflected on how our lives were run by the technology we use and society we form, our insignificance when compared to the entirety of time and space, humans' incapability to every fully understand nature, and the benefits of breaking routine and following our dreams.  We also talked about railroads, the immensity of the universe, ant fights, and loons.  Here are some links that I promised during class.

Here is the Radiolab podcast that talks about the advances in measuring time that came with the arrival of the railroads.  The podcast is about time in general - the talk about railroads starts at around 10:50.

Here is the Radiolab podcast about ants.  Below is a video of ants fighting to give you a better idea of what Thoreau was looking at:

And here is Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying some cool things about space that may help you understand why Emerson and Thoreau found it so amazing.



Also, here is a scale model of the universe provided by one of my students so you can see just how big we are compared to everything else.

AP - The students took their first test on Wednesday.  The test was challenging, but it showed me quickly where the class was having difficulties and where they were grasping material effectively.  I'm going to use the test to inform my instruction as we work over the next few weeks.  I hope the test also gave students a taste of just how demanding the AP test will be and gave them a peak at how developed their critical reading skills will have to be.  We also spent some time writing on a quote from Richard Rodriguez.  Once again, the focus was working closely with a short argument so that critical reading and writing skills could be developed before we started attacking writing on longer passages.  I also thought the discussion helped us work with a more controversial argument (affirmative action, minority designation) and better develop skills for critiquing an author's argument and articulating our own arguments.

The Transparent Eyeball / Education / Self-Reliance

We had Picture Day today so I altered the lesson plan so that the opening part of class we watched videos that allowed us to better get at the concepts in the texts by Emerson we are reading in both classes.  Students that missed those videos can find links to them below.  I also got my photo taken for my ID which I feel makes me look like much more of a lumberjack and much less of a teacher.

English 11 - Yesterday, we spent the full class period working with Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature".  This essay can be very difficult to grasp because the concepts are very abstract and confusing.  Emerson talks about becoming a transparent eyeball that does not have a sense of its own identity, past, or future.  Grasping what the world would even look like from that view can be very hard so I showed Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk about her experience having a stroke.



This video was one of the key ways that I was able to grasp both Emerson's essay and get an understanding of how much of our existence is driven by language.  Jill Bolte Taylor's talk also appears in the Radiolab episode  "Words".  That episode of Radiolab contains a lot of other great stories that really helped me with some of the concepts we are talking about.  We concluded class by working on writing about short quotes from Emerson's essay "Self Reliance".  That essay is filled with some of our most quoted lines (most notably, "Imitation is suicide").  Students described the quotes and then whether or not they disagreed with the statements.  This activity should have helped developed both comprehension and analytic skills.

AP -  We worked with a different Emerson essay, "Education".  In this essay, Emerson argues that teachers should allow students to learn by following their own interests and that the teacher should merely be there to encourage them and get them to develop good habits through practice.  Emerson can be difficult to pin down; he tends to talk abstractly rather than talk about too many specifics.  I had the students watch Sugata Mitra's TED talk so that they could get an idea of what Emerson's theories might look like in contemporary life.



In the video, Mitra describes his experience working with students around the globe and explains just how much they can learn merely by working with group members, the internet, and an encouraging voice.  It's a very interesting talk and, in general, can help teachers reassess what's important in the classroom for long-term learning to occur.  For the rest of the class, we worked with just Emerson's text - categorizing and describing his argument and identifying how and where he was appealing to pathos.  Understanding how an author appeals to pathos will be critical for success on both tomorrow's quiz and the AP exam - I highly suggest students study and feel comfortable with that type of analysis.

Nature / Appositives / Pathos

English 11 - Today, the students worked with Chapter 1 of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature".  This essay can be pretty challenging so we worked through it slowly.  Each student worked on summarizing a paragraph of it in their own words and then compared summaries in a group.  They then shared with the class and I provided support and feedback about the group's summary.  This activity should have helped develop close critical reading skills.  I really enjoyed working with this passage - it's one of my favorite in American Literature.  In it, Emerson conveys his feelings about the awe-inspiring power of nature.  Too frequently, we walk by parts of nature and treat them as ordinary; Emerson asks us to treat them as extraordinary, as awe-inspiring as the moment when we first saw them as children.  If we treat nature this way, we can experience moments of transcendent joy - moments when we forget our pasts and identities and instead just experience a terrifying awe of nature.  In this essay, Emerson introduces the image of his ideal poet - the invisible eyeball uplifted into space that can see everything but maintains no personality.  Of course, such an experience is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain everyday, but as Emerson points out experiencing it for brief moments sometimes will give us a glimpse of just how unimportant most of our conflicts are.  I enjoyed working with students on this extremely difficult piece, and I am looking forward to working with his ideas more as the week goes on.

AP - We focused on getting some extra tools for analyzing rhetorical pieces and strengthening our writing.  We opened up with a lesson on appositives.  Appositives, when used properly, can strengthen writing immensely by making it less choppy and more clear.  They allow us to present more information about a noun without having to rely on extra sentences that seem redundant or present information too late.  After the work with appositives, we focused on developing an understanding of pathos.   When authors appeal to pathos in their arguments, they appeal to our emotions by connecting with our experience, heightening an argument through emotional language, or using humor to soften us up.  Pathos is frequently used for persuasion - getting us not only to believe something, but also to act.  One of the most clear appeals to pathos can be seen in an example brought up in class - Sarah McLachlan's advertisement for the Humane Society.  The images of sick and wounded animals are supposed to convince us not just that animals are in need, but push us to act by donating.  The advertisement is linked below.

The Margins of Education

I want to start by thanking all of the parents that stopped by my classroom during Open House last night. I'm new to Orcutt Academy so it was great to get further acquainted with the community and the parents of the students I see everyday in class. The conversations I had were very helpful and gave me some more ideas of how I can better focus my class to meet the diverse needs of students.

Today, English 11 reflected on the writing we did during the last period and AP began looking at the arguments that their summer reading texts made.

English 11 - We started off class by sharing the writing that students completed during their time outside. All students shared with a partner or group and some students shared with the entire class. I really enjoyed hearing what the students came up with for this open assignment and I got a good peak into their thought processes and method of approaching assignments. I find that getting this peak into their minds can help me better design activities and the way that I approach course material and assignments. I also found myself frequently impressed by the quality of work, openness of thought, and sensitivity of ideas that students produced. After sharing work, students wrote for ten minutes about how this process of writing differed from the processes they typically use for completing school assignments. We used these reflections to help us better understand how American Romantics wrote and got at truths about the world. I also made students aware that they could use this process as an alternate way of producing ideas for school assignments where they felt blocked. As a former college writing tutor and instructor, I've found that the students that are most successful are the ones capable of initiating and choosing between a variety of writing processes as they approach a goal. At the end, I spent some time previewing next week where we will be working with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

AP - Today, we focused on the two texts students read for summer reading - Richard Rodriquez's Hunger of Memory and Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary.  The students spent time by themselves identifying the types of arguments their text was making and pulling out key quotes where the author was making those arguments.  This activity helped strengthen the argument identification skills that will be necessary for rhetorical analysis and critical reading both on the AP exam and in their future careers.  After the solo work, the students worked in groups and shared arguments from both texts.  They then compared and contrasted the authors.  We used the group work as a jumping board for a larger class discussion about the texts and their similarities and differences.  I found the large class discussion tremendously rewarding - it was by far the most intellectually complex conversation we have had so far.  During it, students assessed both writer's arguments, along with their strengths and weaknesses.  We also channeled the diverse experience of the writers and the students in the room to have some excellent conversation about bilingual education, remedial labeling, affirmative action and vocational training.  As the students left, I felt that we were definitely beginning a year that would allow us to approach complex issues using our diverse experiences in a productive academic manner.  In fact,  I was so excited about the possibilities that I threw a reading of Richard Rodriguez's second book Days of Obligation into my reading plans for the weekend so that I would be more capable of rounding out our conversation and providing students with additional information.

Grief

I've just wrapped up my first set of block days.   Over the last two days, English 11 worked with poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and AP worked with an essay by Sherman Alexie and wrote responses to a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

English 11 - We read two poems by Longfellow - "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" and "The Cross of Snow".  Both of these poems, like Bryan's "Thanatopsis", deal with mortality by reflecting on nature.  We spent some time differentiating between summary and interpretation.  Students wrote a plot summary of the poems and then used the summary to build an interpretation about what the poems might say about death.  We established that "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" dealt mostly with the fact that nature continues it cyclical movement for long after we have died and the memory of us has fallen into oblivion.  I found our discussion of "The Cross of Snow" to be much more interesting.  In "The Cross of Snow", the speaker reflects on the loss of a loved one and finds similarities between the cross he's worn over his heart since she died and a cross of snow he sees on a mountain that refuses to melt under the sun's rays.  We delved into the poem at length and by the end discussed the fact that eventually the snow would melt, but that the speaker's memory and grief would last throughout his lifetime.  From this observation, we could see that Longfellow's observation in "Tide Rises" that Nature allows our memory to fall into oblivion is warmed by the fact that the human capacity for language allows for reflection on the past and the continuance of our memory after death through grief and mourning.  I walked away from our discussion of this poem feeling that grief was a much more powerful emotion than I had ever considered.  Our capacity for mourning and grieving are uniquely human powers and can be a truly rewarding and arresting experience.

After finishing the poems, we wrote outside quietly for thirty minutes.  Romantic writers frequently worked this way and I am hoping that the students' experience will allow for us to better get at how Romantic writers thought and why they structured their work the way they did.

AP - We worked again with Francine Prose's essay "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read", but this time used Sherman Alexie's essay "Superman and Me" to support arguments against Prose.  Alexie better helped us see some of the problems with Prose's argument.  We found that Prose too quickly universalized her experience.  In the essay, she claims that life-long love of literature is ignited by contact with complex, challenging works and uses her experience reading King Lear in high school as support.  Alexie's alternate story of a love of reading and writing ignited by comics and pulp novels shows a differing experience and points out the flaw in a writer too quickly allowing her own experience to stand in for everyone else's.  This discussion allowed us to stretch two skills: critiquing the flaws in arguments and using support from one text to argue with another text.  Both of these skills will be critical for student success on the AP exam and in college.

After finishing with Alexie and Prose, the students wrote for a half hour on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Their job was to explain the argument Emerson was making and then defend or attack it.  This activity asked students to closely read an argument and reckon with it rather than attempting to tackle an entire set.  In doing so, they worked on heightening their ability to do close, careful readings.  After finishing their essays, they reviewed essays from two other students in the class and provided feedback on what the essay did well and what it could do better.  Peer review skills are an important feature of most college composition courses and an important long-term skill for most careers.  While students can learn a lot from reading each other's papers, they also become acculturated to the world of work where we frequently work on or critique compositions produced by our colleagues.

Mortality / English Education

I am posting a bit later tonight because I just got back from attending the opening meeting of the Teacher Induction Program put on by Santa Barbara County's Education Office.  For those of you that do not know, all new California teachers must undergo a two-year induction program in order to get a clear credential. Programs like this one are part of the education's field's drive to further professionalize teaching and provide support to teachers.  Professional development opportunities  are one of the many things that are being tried to improve the quality of education.  From my past experience, I have seen that one of the most important ways to increase student learning is to support the growth of teachers.  I am hoping that this program will be a great opportunity for me to grow as a professional educator.

In class today, the English 11 students worked with William Cullen Bryant's poem "Thanatopsis" and the AP students finished looking at different types of arguments and applied their knowledge to a reading of Francine Prose's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read".

English 11 - We opened up class by reflecting on moments when we confronted our own mortality.  Both students and I shared stories from our lives about moments when we considered that we will die eventually or had sudden brushes with death.  I personally reflected on my experience having a pulmonary embolism and undergoing biopsies to determine if I had lung cancer when I was between the ages of 22 and 24.  We then collectively listened to electronic musician Daedalus's song "Thanatopsis" and discussed the thoughts it conjured as we listened.  We discussed the features of the music that created those thoughts and how they might relate to feelings of facing mortality.  Most of our discussion focused on the almost epileptic feeling created by the vocal sampling.  All of this discussion served as a good entry point into Bryant's poem.  The title of Bryant's poem comes from combing the Greek words thanatos (death) and opsis (seeing).  In the poem, Bryant discusses how reflecting on the natural world can comfort us when we are confronted with our eventual demise.  I wanted the students to get a better grasp of translating archaic, difficult prose into their own words so I had them summarize sets of lines on their own.  We then worked together over the course of the class and read passages out loud and created an overall summary of what the lines were describing.  Bryant's poem asks us to realize that when we die, our bodies decay and are enshrined in the beautiful tomb that is the earth where they provide nutrients for the subsistence of the rest of the natural world.  Because of this fact and the fact that all will eventually join us in the tomb, Bryant argues that we should greet death as a comfortable sleep after a fulfilling day.  I like Bryant's ideas here and am especially impressed that he came up with them between the ages of 17 and 19.  However, I know that I am still at times the type of person who clings to life and isn't quite prepared to quietly walk down the hall and take my final nap.

AP - We finished talking about purposes, occasions, and kinds of argument and then applied our knowledge to Francine Prose's article.  Understanding the type of argument an author makes is key to criticizing it so the AP students started stretching skills they would need for the AP test and future college courses.  Prose's argument presents some controversial ideas about English education.  She argues that English education has lost its way by focusing on reading material that Prose thinks is too simplistic (Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird) or presenting complex reading material (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) in simplistic ways that ignore their intricate beauty.  As we dug deeper into the argument and applied our understanding of types of argument, we found that Prose was primarily making an argument of definition about what English class was supposed to be.  Prose felt English class has come to be a place for moral and social reflection and instruction when it should really be a place for the development of critical reading and writing skills and aesthetic appreciation.  The students provided some quality discussion of her argument and started us down the road to pulling together academic essays on education and writing later in the quarter.  Personally, I found that Prose is right to some extent about English class, but I believe truly we need a synthesis of both definitions.  Since language allows us to reflect on our past and formulate decisions about our future, I find that moral development becomes intricately tied to critical reading and writing skills.  I have Lawrence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, and Carol Gilligan to thank for these insights.  Additionally, I find her characterization of Lee and Angelou a bit troubling - these works can be rewarding and complex when they are met with the same critical reading and writing skills that one might apply to traditionally lauded writers, not to mention the fact that Angelou's poetry is being used for great things just on the other side of the campus in Mr. Shaw's psychology class.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed teaching today - a big thanks to all my students.  I felt like we got a lot of work done and you all greatly enriched my understanding of these pieces.   I will not be posting tomorrow because it is a block day.  Instead, I will reflect Thursday night on Wednesday and Thursday classes.

As an additional note, here is one of my favorite songs that deals with the ideas brought up in "Thanatopsis".  It's a cover of Scout Niblett's "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death" and it is recorded by Swedish artist Jens Lekman.

American Romanticism / The Ways We Argue

We are starting our first full week at Orcutt Academy.  Today, English 11 got an introduction to American Romanticism and AP Language and Composition began looking at the varies purposes, occasions, and kinds of arguments.

English 11 - Today, we tried to get at what exactly the Romantic movement was all about.  We established that the Romantics valued feeling and intuition over rational thought.  This concept can be difficult to grasp and, in some of my periods, we got at it by comparing some music from the Baroque period and some music from the Romantic era.  Specifically, we compared Bach's restrained, rational Brandenburg Concertos with the emotional whirlwind that is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.  After establishing some key features of American Romanticism, we dipped into Annie Dillard's "Living Like Weasels".  I enjoyed reading the Dillard piece along with my students as it allowed me to grapple with my own feelings about the Romantic movement.  Romantics so frequently called for us to escape the rational deliberations and reflections that rule our lives and to embrace a connection with our intuition and the ineffable.  However, it is problematic to escape because the thing that separates us from living by instinct like weasels is the human capacity for language.   It seems impossible to get past this facility that makes us unique by offering us the power of reflection and deliberation.  Over the course of the day, I made my peace with Dillard by better understanding, with the help of my students, that perhaps we must look only to these moments beyond language as places of rejuvenation much like Wordsworth's memory of the river Wye in "Tintern Abbey".

AP Comp - We quickly looked over the results from the practice AP multiple choice test and got an idea of what work would lie ahead over the next few months.  Hopefully, the test gave students a better understanding of what skills they would be developing and perfecting.  We then grabbed our three heavy textbooks from the library and went to work on one.  We split up a chapter on purposes, occasions, and kinds of arguments.  In high school, I missed this lesson on argumentation and it kept from really getting in touch with the goals authors had.  I'm hoping by going through this material early we can better understand what authors are trying to achieve and what we ourselves are trying to achieve when we write.  AP students, I put the notes we generated on my staff page under the heading AP Notes.

Reinvention and American Culture/Education

Last week to prepare for a year of studying American literature, my students and I discussed what made American culture different from other cultures.  My students came up with some great ideas which I discussed in Friday's post.  I thought I would post today about one of my own favorite ways in which American culture can be different from other cultures.

One of the characteristics of American literature that stands out to me is the focus placed on the ability of individuals to reinvent themselves.  I see this characteristics recur in many of the "great American novels" and many of the American stories that I enjoy.  I love the story of Hester Prynn in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter - a woman whose embroidered A first starts as a badge of shame but eventually becomes an emblem of the kindness, charity and humility that set her apart from the rest of the village.  I love the story of James Gatz - a boy from North Dakota who renames himself Jay Gatsby and becomes a New York millionaire in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  I love both Twain's Huck Finn, a young boy who reinvents himself almost every day as he travels down the Mississippi, and the narrator of Ellison's Invisible Man, an African American who is writing to become visible in a world that either refuses to see him or refuses to see him in none but the most stereotypical of terms.

Reinvention doesn't just happen in American fiction though.  In fact, I meet people every day who have reinvented themselves - found new careers, new hobbies, and new ways of seeing themselves.  I always find these people invigorating and exciting.  The heart of American pragmatism beats inside of them and their ability to ask not who they think they are, but who they think they can become.   One of my recent favorite stories of this reinvention came from Anthony Pannone's blog The Agvocate where he discussed his journey from minor league baseball player to graduate student in Agricultural Communications at Texas A&M.  I met Anthony when we worked together in the Cal Poly Writing and Rhetoric Center and I always enjoyed talking with him about our shared passion for writing.

Unfortunately, too often we forget the power of American re-invention as educators and students.  We are all here at this school so we can meet new ideas and be transformed into new people - better thinkers or perhaps just different thinkers.  We too quickly see ourselves or others as English kids or sports kids or tech kids and don't notice the ways in which that closes off our experience and potential as Americans and human beings. The important thing is not to police who you and others are today, but instead to look outwards at what you can do and think tomorrow.  Remember Emerson's famous quotation from "Self Reliance":

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. " 

Also, here is the recently deceased contemporary American pragmatist Richard Rorty talking about Emerson's particular brand of American philosophy:

 

Where Do Sentences Come From?

My mother is a 6th grade teacher at Donner Springs Elementary in Reno, NV.  Yes - it is named after the ill-fated Donner Party, which seems a bit gruesome when you think about it.  However, since I was born and raised in Reno where the Donner name has been given to lakes, parks, and springs, I find it pretty banal.

Since my mom and I are both teachers, we frequently talk about the teaching of writing - what is our goal exactly and what is the best way to teach students how to write well?  She recently sent me a link to Verlyn Klinkenborg's article "Where Do Sentences Come From?" which appeared in the August 13th edition of the New York Times.  The article points to a problem that us English teachers have had for years - how do we make student writing activities more authentic?  Sentences are typically constructed for purposes - aesthetic beauty, convincing others of political beliefs, sharing feelings of love, communicating priorities at work, and more - but too frequently our classroom writing activities forget this key fact.

As English teachers, our goal is to craft writing assignments that are authentic and purposeful, but continuously we find ourselves assigning theme papers on The Great Gatsby or Romeo and Juliet that feel more like exercises in which students spit our own opinions back at us.  As a field, we have not fully dealt with this problem, but we do have many promising activities and ideas that will help better prepare students for the authentic writing tasks they will face later in careers and college.  I hope that as you follow this blog, you will be able to follow along with many of the promising changes and innovations in writing instruction that are happening and being brought into the classroom.

On a tangential note, my AP students and I spent the summer reading articles from The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's.  One of my students read an article that I also read and found interesting as an English teacher, Jack Hitt's "Words On Trial".  Hitt provides an overview of forensic linguistics - a growing English field that analyzes writings in order to identify suspected criminals and was partially responsible for the capture of the Unabomber.  Forensic linguists analyze writing style and colloquial language to identify the age, region, and profession of suspects. Interestingly enough, our sentences come partially from our experience of the world - the dialects we have encountered, education we received, and fields we worked in - and they can also betray us in ways that we are not aware.

How is American Culture Different? / Getting to Know the AP Exam

We've finished up the first week.  Most of the time so far has been spent getting to know what the course is all about and who all of us are.  Probably one of the best parts of teaching five classes each day is that even when I am giving the same lesson for the third or fourth time, it all changes because of the diverse groups of students in the room.  Today, English 11 focused on how American culture is different and AP Composition got to better understand the test they would be taking in May.

English 11 - At the start of class, each student wrote for twenty minutes about how American culture was different from other cultures.  After they finished writing, they shared with groups and then the whole class.  The activity helped me get a better sense of who each student was as a writer and how they approached writing.  We also got to see that American culture is vast and that there are many different ways to view being American.  We discussed how superheroes were a distinctly American fascination.  In particular, we talked about how Superman tells the story of an immigrant trying to fit in and become American by taking on the alter-ego Clark Kent.  We also talked about American obesity and our fascination with fast food and instant gratification.  Students brought up that rock music is American, and as I pointed out rock comes from blues and jazz music which are also American.  We also talked about how the tremendously successful women's Olympics team was partially a result of America's focus on equal rights and Title IX.

AP Composition - The students all took the multiple choice portion of the AP Composition exam.  I wanted them all to get a good idea of what the test was asking of them and the types of language they would have to be comfortable using.  We discussed what some of the students thought of the exam and on Monday they will get to see how they would stack up against other students taking the exam that year.

On a side note, it looks like the seniors at OAHS got to my car.  Juniors, what are you doing?  You are supposed to be protecting me.

Why Do We Take English Class?

Hello, students, parents, and staff!  I'm a new teacher at Orcutt Academy.  I've come from teaching and working with college writers and I'm looking forward to bringing those skills to the high school classroom.  My goal is not only to create students that go to college and/or get their ideal job, but also flourish while they do it.  I'm planning on keeping this blog as a place to reflect on my classroom and keep everyone in the loop about what is happening.

So far, my AP and English 11 students have both been learning why we take English classes.  I never fully considered this question until I got into graduate school and was paying extravagant prices for the pleasure of going to English class  for 4-8 hours a day.  I've reflected on the question throughout my career and what I have found is that, as humans, we are the only organism on the earth that has been given the gift of fully-developed language.  In fact, almost everything we think about that makes us human revolves around this gift - creating poetry and works of art, planning the building of skyscrapers, learning to play basketball and chess.  English class allows us to develop this human gift so that we can better thrive and flourish as human beings.  I've attached a link to a presentation I gave in class to give you a better understanding of exactly what I am talking about.

http://prezi.com/ib65zctqru9f/why-do-we-take-english-class/

We also spent some time reading and discussing a short selection from Walt Whitman's famous poem "Song of Myself".