For all those Dickens fans… Here’s a 200 year birthday review kindness of The Guardian.
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
English
Welcome to the Triple A Learning blog for DP English. The most recent blog posts are listed below and you can access the blog archive by following the appropriate link in the panel on the left.
February 7, 2012
February 5, 2012
Fans of David Foster Wallace
One of my favorite Wallace essays is “A Supposedly Fun Thing…..” (also the title of a collection). I’ve always wanted to read it with students, but never could find quite the right spot or occasion, and it is quite long. For fans of DFW, Jonathan Frantzen has an equally compelling if different essay in the New Yorker which is a genre-bender combination of travel narrative, elegy and litcrit on the novel. The light he casts on Wallace’s death is a unique one, I think, and it’s a masterful elegiac piece as well. Just one paragraph is compelling, and maybe you will read the whole article. Something for your literary life, and maybe or maybe not for your students.
On the eve of my departure for Santiago, I visited my friend Karen, the widow of the writer David Foster Wallace. As I was getting ready to leave her house, she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera. I said I would, and she found an antique wooden matchbox, a tiny book with a sliding drawer, and put some ashes in it, saying that she liked the thought of part of David coming to rest on a remote and uninhabited island. It was only later, after I’d driven away from her house, that I realized that she’d given me the ashes as much for my sake as for hers or David’s. She knew, because I had told her, that my current state of flight from myself had begun soon after David’s death, two years earlier. At the time, I’d made a decision not to deal with the hideous suicide of someone I’d loved so much but instead to take refuge in anger and work. Now that the work was done, though, it was harder to ignore the circumstance that, arguably, in one interpretation of his suicide, David had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels. The desperate edge to my own recent boredom: might this be related to my having broken a promise to myself? The promise that, after I’d finished my book project, I would allow myself to feel more than fleeting grief and enduring anger at David’s death?
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/18/110418fa_fact_franzen#ixzz1lRog1QSL
January 30, 2012
Ideas about film and literature for Part 4, Language A Literature
Here are some ideas about literary texts and film from an online workshop participant with thanks to Sahiba Al-issa:
One work that would be interesting to teach is ‘The Road to Perdition’; – a film based on a gangster’s life; I have shown the film to students in my Bachelor in Mass Media classes as it is a powerful film. There is very little dialogue, and, surprisingly, interspersed with violence is a most imaginative use of silence. Then recently, I found it was a graphic novel. Can such a work be taught? I thought It would be perfect for this Option of Literature and Film.
January 21, 2012
Graphic novel resources
Here are some resources contributed by Melissa Hamley from Hoover High School in Alabama; hope you will find them as useful as I have:
Graphic Novel Resources:
The Post-Modern Novel; Comics in Education ; Comics in the Classroom;
Graphic Novel Template; Storyboard Template
January 17, 2012
Professional development with Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops
There is still time to take advantage of Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops. Over the last three years we have trained over 4000 IB teachers on our IB authorised workshops, at both category 1 and category 3.
Follow the links below to see the range on offer. Our next session begins on FEBRUARY 20th. Do not miss out on these…book now to update your professional training. Our interactive workshops and resources will help take your career to the next level and support your classroom practice. Our courses cover subject-specific and whole-school topics and make the in-service training budget go further.
January 12, 2012
January 9, 2012
wordle for making word clouds
Don’t know if people are using this, but I did have my students do this with Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” and it revealed a lot about how they read the text and what might be good avenues for choosing topics for essays and oral presentations: http://www.wordle.net/
January 7, 2012
January 4, 2012
Equality Leads to Excellence in Education
At times in teaching it’s good to step back and think about how our cultural values have shaped our educational systems,the results, and whether we can step out of our ideological paradigms enough to adopt better practices. We may not be able to change our national systems or the IB as much as we would like (though there is plenty of scope for that too) but we can surely look for ways to make sure all students within our care are treated equitably.
I’ll find a way to use The Atlantic’s article ”What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success” in my English A: language and literature class probably at the beginning of next year. It will provide a good opportunity for students to share their own educational experiences, and that can be very helpful to know as a teacher, whether it’s part of the syllabus or not.
January 2, 2012
literacy/oral presentations
I have to admit to occasionally raving about trying to teach literature to a post-literate generation. However, if you can believe Clive Thompson and the data of the Stanford Study, at least students are writing more avidly than ever AND they are more conscious of the business of writing for an audience. An older stance is that you learn to write well by reading. And if students are more conscious of audience, does this carry on into presenting orally to an audience? Some interesting implications, perhaps?
