Our Field Trip to See "How the World Began"

 

 

The Art of Conversation

"There is no conversation more boring than the one
where everybody agrees."  --Michel de Montaigne

www.larrydressler.com

Textbook Art

 


A great source of art comes to teachers and students through our textbooks.  Whenever I use our Brit. Lit. or American Lit. textbook to look at short stories or poems, I ask students why they think our textbook authors chose to pair a particular piece of artwork with the work of literature we're looking at. 

Brightening Up a Winter Monday

Today my Writing Lab class made a bulletin board filled with positive quotations.  We encouraged students and staff to pick a quote to keep with them in their pockets.  By the end of the day, the board was almost bare!  My favorite quote chosen by a student was by Joyce Meyer:  "A number two pencil and a dream can take you anywhere."

Beautiful Words

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; 

to me those have always been 

the two most beautiful words 

in the English language.”

 --Henry James

What do you think are the most beautiful words in the English language?

W. H. Auden

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."  --W. H. Auden 

Why We Explore

All of my AP students subscribed to National Geographic magazine over the summer.  This month's topic aligns perfectly with our theme of Seeing:  Why We Explore.  The students' assignment with the magazine is to post a  paragraph response to one of the articles or photographs in the magazine on our Piazza online discussion board and then respond to the posts of two other students.


 

Swift's Vision

 "Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."  --Jonathan Swift

High School Linguistics

In addition to AP English, American Authors, and Writing Lab (crazy year!!), I also teach an elective course on Linguistics (I designed the class for my Master's thesis project).  For those of you interested in learning more about teaching Linguistics at the high school level, I invite you to visit:  http://highschoollinguistics.blogspot.com

Juan and Sabrina meet our guest speaker on Dec. 21st

Going To See a Play

There is something special about seeing a play:  the lights dimming, the characters entering, stepping out of  regular routine for a day.  Today our AP class went to see the Milwaukee Rep's performance of A Christmas Carol.  Most exciting to me is that some students were seeing their very first play!  After the performance we enjoyed a sunny stroll along the Milwaukee River Walk and had lunch at the Grand Avenue Mall.

 

 

Looking at the World

I ran across this quote from Louise Gluck in this week's issue of The Week:

"We look at the world once, in childhood.  The rest is memory."

I would add that we get a second chance to look at the world:  in parenthood.

My family playing in the leaves

The Worms Have Arrived!

My Writing Lab class has taken on the creation of a school-wide composting program.  A few weeks ago, Kate Carney from Keep Greater Milwaukee Beautiful visited our classroom to teach us more about composting.  After her visit, students wrote a letter to Sweet Water Organics to ask for a donation of red wigglers to help us give indoor vermicomposting a shot.  On Friday, Kate came back with the worms!  Students had a contest to see which group could write the best morning announcement to educate our peers about the benefits of composting.  One of the things we were surprised to learn is that every American throws away an average of five pounds of garbage a day.

MSL students and teachers:   Listen to the announcements to hear when we'll be collecting leftover fruits and vegetables from Lunch D to give to the worms.  Also, we plan to sell our composting product at Festival of Nations on March 7th.


Here are some pictures from our work on Friday:

Working on advertising our project

Networking with teachers to get coffee grounds

Leaves=worm food!

The worms will also eat newspaper and paper bags.

For indoor composting, you want the mix to be 75% brown.

Back from raking

There they are!

Making our worms a home

Coffee ground success!

Getting out the last of our worms

Almost done!

Class photo!

The compost bin in place in the greenhouse over a drain surrounded by bags of leaves!

Fifth Hour Artistically Presents...The Great Gatsby

In American Authors, students were assigned to translate The Great Gatsby into an art project.  They had the options to draw a chapter, scene, symbol, setting, or character.  One student chose to write a poem and one chose to write a screenplay of Chapter One.  We will save our creations for our Festival of Nations project in March when we present Midnight in Paris, focused on Paris in the 1920s and inspired by the Woody Allen film.