Me: Do you want to play a game at the end of class? Students: Is it a vocabulary game? Me: Of course it is. Let’s be honest, pretty much all my games are vocabulary games. We’ve been working on college essays for a while now in eleventh grade American Literature class. It’s a useful way to…
Tag: Black Forest Academy
Entangling Details, Words of Worth
Wednesday afternoon, I’m missing track practice to finish up final details for Friday’s Junior-Senior Banquet. It has traditionally been the responsibility of the junior class to fundraise and then plan this event, BFA’s version of prom. (And by “junior class,” I mean about a third of the juniors, two endlessly hardworking class officers and ten…
We Didn’t Always Live in Kandern
As often happens, I have words stuck in my head. These ones aren’t the common song lyrics, though. I’m the only person I know who is haunted by lines of prose. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street.” Those used to be first words I read to my students, back at Ingraham, nine thousand miles…
On Surprises
We’re sitting in a rectangle of desks on Friday afternoon, ready for Round Two of poetry presentations in American Literature class. Yesterday, the class was a showcase of teenaged creativity. I’ve arranged their projects on the low bookshelf that runs along the back of the room: a model village to illustrate E.E. Cummings’s “anyone lived…
Marble Cake and Maugenhard
“Well, you should probably just make a dessert. Any kind of dessert, for Sunday night,” the Maugenhard RA tells me after a supper of spaghetti, during which we watched snow fall outside on the not-yet-green hills of the Black Forest. Spring is delayed this year, after what’s been called “the darkest winter in 43 years.”…
English Teacher Neverland
“I mean, if you have to spend almost all of your money on something–” I begin. “–it should probably be a book,” he cuts me off with a solemn nod. “Exactly.” Honors American Literature, Winter 2013 I remember the war between kids and reading. It was a Genesis 3-style feud: And I shall put enmity between teenagers and…
“Worth The Sadness”
I know that it’s English teacher heresy, but I find Dead Poets Society impossibly sad. Peter Weir’s 1989 film has become a personal classic, falling into the genre of “teacher movies” that I consume with the same emotional voracity that some men I know attach to sports or war movies. I love these movies, and watch them…
Of Returning
My students have obligingly pulled their chairs into a rough circle on the second afternoon of school in 2013. We’re reading Emily Dickinson aloud, each student sharing his or her favorite from last night’s reading, explaining why it was so special. My classroom fills with the call and response of familiar words in familiar voices, punctuated by…
Trying to Play Soccer, And Other Dangerous Endeavors
I’m completely soaked by the time I get to the soccer field, near the end of my 5k afternoon run. It’s been raining for ages, you see. Four or five days. And it’s that cold, wet rain that would be snow if it had any decency, but it doesn’t, so it just keeps raining and raining….
A Letter of Thanks
On Thanksgiving Day in Germany, we go to school, like other Thursdays. To celebrate, I asked my students to write letters of thanks. Their letters were meant to be symbolic, written to objects, places or people that wouldn’t necessarily respond. As I think of what I’m thankful for this year, it’s more a group of…
The Way Home 