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There are many traditions that surround the start of a new school year: new shoes, new clothes, first-day-of-school pictures. For teachers, there are fresh bulletin boards, class lists, and, for some, an inbox full of email promotions from travel companies. And often that means planning not for the current school year, but for the year after.
Poetry has been my lifelong friend who always shows up at the right time. My English I and II classes have just begun their Poetry Unit. I look forward to gently nudging the scholars to find the poet inside themselves.
Growing up, poetry came into my life with artists like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell. When I was earning my undergraduate degree, I studied under Jorie Graham who later won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I still keep a personal note to me from Jorie as a reminder of how one teacher can introduce you to a whole new way of thinking about words.
Is it important to teach English grammar in our schools? Do kids need to know the difference between a noun and an adjective, or between the subject and the direct object of a sentence? Before the 1960s, educators generally believed that understanding grammar was crucial to becoming an articulate speaker and a good writer of English. But a sea change in thinking occurred in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
I am an English teacher who is passionate about literature. Catch me in my AP class and you’ll see that I’m a superb lecturer (though I do stray from literature every so often; see my blog on why I teach Aristotle’s Ethics). In my standard English classes, however, as I have gathered experience over the last 10 years, I have moved away more and more from pure literature, and exposed my students to magazine articles (old and new), op-eds, and other types of non-fiction, like primary source documents such as historical memos, convention resolutions, and legal opinions.
A weighty concern on many teenagers' minds right now is, "How strong is my high school preparation for college?" Certainly, part of the responsibility for college readiness lies with the student: to best prepare for college while in high school, should you take college-level classes in high school or utilize some other tool?
At The Beekman School, English teachers are given the freedom to personalize the curriculum by reading literature that’s not on most high school syllabi. While we don’t neglect the classics, we do spend the first week sizing up a class to determine what texts students might find especially engaging.
Too often high school teachers serve up the same “classic” novels that have weighed down the literary canon for decades. You know the culprits: The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Grapes of Wrath, to name a few.
We all have stories. Sometimes we think that our stories are not valuable or interesting, but if our inaugural Chirp Café last week taught us anything, it’s that this just isn’t the case. The room was packed to the rafters with spectators who were there to listen to students tell their personal stories of transition and change.
Plagiarism is one of those things kids know of, but are not sure about. They read something on the Internet and think, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to say. This person said it better than I ever could,” and then they don’t know what to do. I put a note on a student’s assignment that said we need to chat about plagiarism. This particular student had been having trouble with this consistently the previous year. Because I would be teaching him again, I decided that I would begin a discussion of plagiarism right away.
When Emma Eden Ramos walked into The Beekman School in 2003, she found a haven. “Beekman gave me the opportunity to be myself without feeling self-conscious or ashamed,” she says. Moreover, the school also allowed her to focus on her studies and her dreams.
