There's a little sticker reading "Sci-fi/Fantasy" on the cover of my library copy of Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. Well. I guess this novel, about the inadvertently-immortal family the Tucks, and their run-in with the mortal human world, is a fantasy, but only in the same way Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables are fantasies. For my beloved little Tuck creates and populates a world — in this case, a small town in the 1880s called "Treegap" — just as surely as those classics do, without aliens, space travel or weird people in trench coats lurking around. I hate to see this gem of a novel get brushed off to a genre audience, for it has much to teach classrooms of young adults.  Continue reading...

This school year has roared out of the blocks like Usain Bolt running the 100 meter sprint in Beijing. And like Mr. Bolt, every member of the school community is learning that their capacity to go faster and accomplish more is yet to be discovered. But even with numerous multi-tasking and time-management challenges, I've had a few moments to pause and enjoy the enthusiastic and intelligent learning connections teachers at my school are bringing to their students.  Continue reading...

In my last column, I began an overview of how Thornton Wilder used language in his classic American play, Our Town. Teachers, you'll want to read that column before picking up here, which points out several more ways Wilder adeptly used words in his play. You'll be able to use these ideas in your classroom.  Continue reading...

Hi, faithful Visual Thesaurus subscribers! I'm back! Did you have a good summer? Did you miss me? I missed writing this column for you. One of the nice things about having some time off from full-time teaching (besides the long days spent in pajamas and sleeping past 6 a.m.) was that I had an opportunity to think about the next direction to take my contributions to the "Teachers at Work" feature.  Continue reading...

The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous."  Continue reading...

Okay, y'all, last month's column wore me out. So I turned off the interweb, rested my mouse-clickin' hand, and took a nap with Julie Andrews' wonderful memoir, Home, on my chest. Now, as I promised, I'm back with more resources to help teachers get their students to grasp literature through historical context.  Continue reading...

On a test given on The Crucible during my first year of teaching high school English, I asked my juniors to name the time period of the play. Now, I'm sure I mentioned this several times while we read it, and — call me crazy — but I'm also fairly certain Miller specified that his play is set in the 1600's, what with his bonnets and "Goodys" and the fact that the Salem Witch Hunt took place in that century. I assumed that this was enough information to answer the question correctly.

O, foolish young teacher! Among the responses I received: "The Civil War," "American times," "Long ago," "the Colonial Era," and, my favorite, "the Early Twentieth Century."  Continue reading...