My mother posted the YouTube link I attached below on Facebook last week, and combined with a ‘thank you’ for a good faculty meeting last Tuesday, I forwarded it along to the High School faculty thinking that some faculty members might want to show it to their homeroom advisories at some point. “Boatlift”, the story […]
Becoming a Progress Culture: Keeping the College Process in Mind
I have written often in the last few months about the need to create a school Progress Culture. One of the issues that can paralyze discussions regarding how to move schools beyond the perceived safety of “what we have always done” and toward a progress culture, however, is the college selection process whose shadow stretches back […]
Using Welty and Hayden to Create A Poetry Mashup in Ninth Grade English
In my ninth grade English class we are heading into a study of poetry in the first half of this semester. In order to make a transition from our work with novels (Purple Hibiscus), plays (A Raisin in the Sun), and short stories last fall, we started this week by reading the short story “A […]
A Surprise Purchase and An Unexpected Buckhead Connection: Five Gallon Kline & Brown Churn
At one point just before the crowd started to thin out toward mid-afternoon, the auctioneer, Greg Peters (no relation), had one of his assistants turn on the air-conditioning in the big room that had become stuffy enough for people to start using their xeroxed auction catalogues as fans. Having recently moved to Atlanta from Cleveland, […]
Step Three of an Atlanta Barbecue Pilgrimage
Barbecue. Some very smart people, who otherwise might have put their brains to solving the riddle of cancer or the challenges of peace in the Middle East, have committed their lives to cooking it, eating it, analyzing it, comparing it, arguing about it, and waxing nostalgic about it. Memphis tomato-based fanatics square off regularly against North Carolina […]
Purpose of Education?: “The World Needs You to be Smart”
[Last January I handed the following piece to the seniors in my 21st Century Short Fiction and Poetry Class. We were just about to finish a collection of short stories by Stephen Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter) and begin a poetry collection by Louise Gluck (A Village Life). A contemporary of mine at Sewanee, the author of the piece, […]