Just before Thanksgiving, Ed Helms, the actor who plays Andy Bernard on The Office and a member of Westminster’s class of 1992, visited campus and spoke a la Inside the Actors Studio with students and faculty in the morning and alumni in the evening. I had the chance to speak with him very briefly—one of […]
Bringing Students and Families into the School
Last weekend we had an Admissions Open House at Westminster, and I noted how often current students remarked to prospective families that the presence of a student buddy was helpful in making their own transitions into the school. Most interestingly, several students remarked how important that person had continued to be years after the adjustment […]
Making Academic Writing Meaningful: Preparing an Exam Prompt
Today I am thinking about how to create a meaningful writing challenge for my students within the borders of an essentially artificial exercise–the semester exam. For one of the sections of the exam I plan on including a slightly unusual task for a fairly traditional goal–to ask students to demonstrate their understanding of A Raisin […]
The Talent Assembly: Evidence of the Ties that Bind Us
[This is a slight revision of a post that was originally published on the edu180atl blog on November 18, 2011. The rules for posts on the edu180atl site are that each post must be about something the author learned that day, and each post must be no more than 250 words.]Today we had a Talent […]
A.I. Totten: A Thanksgiving for a Role Model
My grandfather A.I Totten, led a remarkable life and though he passed a number of years ago now, I still think of him often. (In fact, I think of all my grandparents often, and I am certain I will write about each on this blog at some point.) A letter I wrote to him on […]
Revisiting Hamlet and the Writing Process
[Ten years ago, I was Humanities Chair at Asheville School as we transitioned to a Humanities Department from separate English and History Departments. One of our goals, in addition to incorporating art and music history into our teaching, was to improve our efforts to teach writing across the curriculum. During that first Fall as a […]