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 […]
Going to the Slotin Folk Art Auction: Finding the Self-Portrait with Guitar
Several times when we lived in Asheville, NC, I made the early morning drive west on I-40 to Canton, then swept southwest on Highway 74 to US 441 and finally to US 23. Passing Waynesville, Silva, Dillard, Bryson City, Clayton, and Rabun Gap, it is a beautiful drive that slowly, and briefly steeply, falls out […]
Thinking About Process Change (Part Two): Holding Off the Rite of Passage
I have always been fascinated with rites of passage as they make ritual from the incomprehensible space between one stage of life and the next. Rites of passage represent moments where we are between and therefore we are nowhere—not where we were and not quite where we will be. In response to such moments, we create […]