Category: Teaching

Art Comes to You

In my first years as an English teacher, bringing art into my classroom took a lot more effort than it does today. Of course there were pictures in textbooks (some […]

wexpagesprogram November 24, 2020 Leave a Comment

My Hope for Students

The end of the 2019-2020 school year was, to say the least, unconventional; to say the most, it was awful! Community building is a huge part of my classroom environment […]

Constructing and Locating (Creative) Freedom

transcript: “When given a completely blank canvas I feel constrained. When I am told what the boundaries are, and I have a place to focus, I feel actually free. In […]

“A Powerful Discourse on Love”

During the Pages fall retreat, 15 educators and teaching artists gathered in a room with visual artist and scholar, Ann Hamilton, as she led us in a “choral reading” deconstructing […]

Blacking Out Robert Frost

You know when you’ve done a lesson so many times, it’s become muscle memory? You can just walk into class, set-it-up and then just go-! Poof! Wonderful lesson, wonderful class […]

Group Projects

Uniting 40 people with one project is not an easy task. It requires compromise, collaboration and patience. I’m happy to report our class successfully created a group project that added […]

Strengthening Memory Through Arts-Integrated Experiences

What do we remember? The blur of objects, a yellow bird, a clown, polka dots, the dead owl, a monkey, the plaid shirt, stripes, colors, a wall of inflamed sayings, […]

Handwritten Pages

I still find evidence of my past when cleaning out a desk drawer, when flipping through a book from a previous class, when rediscovering a journal. I relish opening the […]

An Essay in Pictures

I worry sometimes that we are losing a little more of our creativity each time we work through the writing process. Typically in AP Literature and Composition, we write and […]

Designing Better Rubrics

Rubrics are useful for giving students straight feedback that reflects their performance and for showing them where they need to stretch their skills. They can be task specific or general. […]

Know Thy Student

How much, a young mentee educator asked me, must I know about students in order to be most helpful to them? This was my response: I need to see what […]

Educating for the Good Life

Once, a colleague happened to be looking at a sample question from the latest Science standardized test Ohio students are mandated to take and for which school districts and educators […]

Tension and Revision: Experimenting with Sound

Several days after Michael Torres visited Big Walnut, students approached me to ask if it was true: Did a man play his saxophone, making it sound like a blender? Yes, […]

Poems from a Jar

Т Т Т Raoul Peck, in the introduction of the companion text to his documentary I Am Not Your Negro, said that receiving James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript was like accepting “…a […]

Sharing Fear and Creative Writing

Т Т Т Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein–each year my students experience a love-hate relationship with this classic text, which translates to my own love-hate relationship when teaching it. The text is long, […]