I came to Helena High after a period of wandering that included attending law school for two days, coaching debate at Carroll College for four years, and teaching in Great Falls for nine months, but the real decision to become a teacher probably began in a theater in Billings, Montana, when I saw "Dead Poets Society" for the eleventh or twelfth time. As ridiculous as it sounds, that little movie helped me understand that my passion for language and literature was something that could be shared with others. I believe that education is about challenging people to see the world in a way they never imagined before, using dialogue and discussion. As Paolo Freire wrote, "Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking , is also capable of generating critical thinking". Every minute of our lives is an opportunity for education, if we are only willing to let it be. |
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The words for the vocab quiz will be posted this afternoon when I get home. Sorry for the delay.
Some interesting thoughts in the blogs about poor Antigone in the past week:
AP students in period three, I might have given you 10 more pages than I intended to. You should read to page 263 for class tomorrow.
If you would like some resources for the Antigone essay, here is a place to start .
A few big picture thoughts about the first set of essays that I received on Sunday.
- Really nice work for the most part in terms of proofing your work. I was happy not to be working on much grammar/usage.
- Thanks for being on time with your essays. That helps a lot.
- Novel/Play selection needs to be better. A few non-novels and non literary works crept in. Take the prompts seriously.
- The essays need to do a better job of addressing the second half of the prompt. We'll talk this week about an easy strategy to do this.
- Embeddding quotations are a consistent problem. Please see the online handout about doing it correctly.
- The balance between including plot details and doing plot summary is something we will spend a lot of time on the next few weeks.
Overall, a really pleasant start–at least on the essays I have read thus far. You should all have your essays back on Tuesday, with a chance to revise.
