I have a Word document that serves as a sort of a giant virtual workshop at the center of which is a virtual worktable where I can tighten the vice down on an idea or topic.
Rivendell Writers’ Colony: Cultivating Creativity
“Rivendell seems to stand less as something built on the Cumberland Plateau than something pulled up from within it.” Just outside Sewanee, Tennessee, a large, beautiful stone house called Rivendell sits just off the lip of the aptly named Lost Cove, an enclosed cove where all the water that falls within its boundary drains into a sink […]
The Hoarder’s Writing Shop and Table
Something from Ecclesiastes…some poems I haven’t finished (or rather am not ready to part with)… part of an email conversation about the role of technology in an English classroom…a paragraph I like from a letter I didn’t send several years ago…I have a Word document that serves as a sort of a giant virtual workshop […]
An Essay Grading Criteria for High School
[Around 1998, as part of an effort to make the evaluation of Senior Demonstration essays more consistent at Asheville School, I wrote a grading criteria that over the years evolved into the document that follows. When we took the step of creating a Humanities Department out of the faculties of both the History and English […]
Differentiated Assessment of Student Writing in an English Class
[In order to align myself fully with the vision of the school, I will need to improve my ability to differentiate instruction. As part of my self-reflection on this topic, not only am I thinking about areas where my teaching practice may be deficient (or more generously, ready for rethinking), but I am also thinking […]
Ecclesiates 1:18 …Wisdom and Vexation, Knowledge and Sorrow: Bidding Farewell to An Essay Prompt
[In searching for some old documents related to our study of poetry in my English 9 class, I stumbled (can one stumble into an old computer file?) into an old exam question I used when I taught AP Literature. I like the question, and I used it in slightly varied ways over the course of […]