Resources about Knowledge (Can this title be more vague?)
Admittedly, Theory of Knowledge class has its limitations: 1. For some strange reason, we are forced to assess our students (One can sarcastically imagine teachers asking themselves, “How proficient...
View ArticlePlays in Plays (What happens when fiction lives in fiction?)
From Borges to Cervantes to Shakespeare to Velazquez, many artists have produced works that ask the question of “what happens when fiction lives in fiction?” and experimented with the play-in-play, or...
View ArticleCultural and Contextual Considerations in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
View The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in a larger map This will be the final installment of our reflections on translated works, and we we will use the same requirements as when we wrote about Chronicle of...
View ArticleLaberinto
My 11th grade English class has been studying translated texts by authors–Borges, Murakami, and Marquez–who reference and use labyrinths as symbols in their writing, and we have been working with a...
View ArticlePodcast Episode 3: The Murakami Chronicles
In the third episode of our 11th Grade English Literature class Podcast Series, students discuss Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Part 1 (0:25-16:03): Cinthiya, Aidyn & Rachel...
View ArticleAwkward Film Project Trailer
For the last unit of 10th Grade English, groups created short films around the general theme of awkwardness. Students pitched ideas, wrote screenplays, participated in table reads, storyboarded,...
View ArticleAnother Impeccable Anderson Kingdom
Every couple years I get to enter what I call Wes’ World, by buying a movie ticket and seeing the new Wes Anderson film on the big screen, as he intends them to be experienced–at least for the first...
View ArticleWaving Goodbye to Norway
Apparently I wave a lot while enjoying the Norwegian outdoors, so I put together what I thought would be a fitting small video compilation of shots from Norway, including Rondane, Jotunheimen,...
View ArticleSierra Adventure
With lightened packs for ease of travel, my brother and I set out for a five day trip in the John Muir Wilderness area of Eastern Sierras, part of the Inyo National Forest. Due to an early snow-melt,...
View ArticleA Few Enjoyable Travel Essays
I wanted to highlight and compile a few “travel essays”–and I’m using that term lightly–that I have recently read and enjoyed, including two written by John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose essay collection...
View ArticleOn A Journey Through the Past (Will I still be in your eyes and on your mind?)
Neil Young seems to be in a reflective mood these days. Now that his memoir is finished, he’s got his old tried and true band Crazy Horse back together again, and after recording two albums together...
View ArticleKurt Vonnegut’s Delightfully Analog Routine
Perhaps it is not without a bit of that certain type of Vonnegut-style irony 1 that a few months back I read an excerpt from a collection of letters on my laptop from an RSS feed from a...
View ArticleFive Ways To Make Your Essay Writing Better
With the fear that this post’s title has already detracted most students of writing from reading this entry, I wanted to elaborate on a few aspects of expository, analytical or argumentative writing...
View ArticleNine Good Films About Writing
I recently read an old post by N. Frank Daniel, author of Futureproof, where he lists his top 11 Films about Writing. After realizing that this is a genre of film that I quite enjoy, I got to thinking...
View ArticleDIY Upcycled Student Notebooks
The amount of paper a school consumes is amazing. More and more, I think teachers are trying to consciously minimize this, by photocopying only what is necessary, by using the at one point in time...
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