Addicted

I'm already addicted to this blogging business. I have a few observations: the first is how exciting it is to be spending my time with people who love literature as much as I do and as strongly as I do, but who want to use that love not to write complicated analytical papers, but to make the world a better place and to open minds and hearts and introduce skills. After school/work tonight Lizette and I gabbed about our favorite authors and what poems and short stories we wanted to teach next year, and got very revved up. What an idealistic bunch we are.

The second observation is that David Copperfield, my current reading project, is sooooo good. It's so much better and more absorbing than any other Dickens novel I've ever read, even Great Expectations whose racy overtones (uneaten wedding cake anyone?) used to get me very excited about the world of literary analysis. More importantly than DC being "good" is that its subject, the growth and maturing of and the hardships faced by a young man in a cruel ,mercenary and not particlarly child-friendly world, has struck me as incredibly relevant to what we're undertaking here. Adolescence is so universal and unchanging from century to century, and the influence of older people on David's development (and their inability to stop him from some of his foolish choices) is poignant, and even makes me think of the "emotional intelligence" and other adolescent psycho-jargon I'm learning at Lehman.

My final observation is that the article we read tonight about Literacy for the 21st century (http://techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15202090), could barely contain its bile and spite towards No Child Left Behind, which made me happy. I thought its three additional criteria for students--global knowledge, technical knowledge, and civic knowledge--were spot-on. So now we have to integrate all those three, plus emotional intelligence, into our english classrooms. Good thing literature is so damn flexible.

My second posting

Ok, so now I'm posting for real. As my previous post indicates, I'm thrilled that I am getting do do this project. I was worried that this summer would be dry and impractical but I have already formulated all sorts of castles in the air about my class's amazing webpage (whether my Truman HS guys and gals will actually have internet access remains to be seen) and my ultra-sophisticated and very witty socio-policitical blog which I will assuredly be able to keep up despite the demands of my new job (yeah right).

This blog is part of my coursework for Lehman's EXC 529 "Literacy, language and technology" which is proving to be a hotbed of debate about technology in the classroom. Most of us are anglophiles who are of course signing on as English teachers because we like dusty old books written in many cases by DWM-- dead white men (or in my case, dead white women who gave those DWM a good literary challenge). Nonetheless, it's important to know how to relate our coursework to the practical world. Blogs and online publications are, importantly, free, and therefore a good resource for our students. And having a course website is a dream come true... whether or not we actually rely on it to convey info to our students, it's a good first step. Someday we will rely more heavily on websites, just as our college courses did, to everyone's benefit.

(Closing interjection: "Yay! This is fun")

First posting

After so many months of reading deliciously gossipy blogs, at last I have my own. Teaching, here I come.