Two years running, I tried a hand in each camp: one edition of The Catcher in The Rye (what we fondly came to call the “Wee Version”–the maroon cover most readers recall) in my right for the students who’d purchased that one, and in my left, the other–larger format, red carousel horse, sunshine yellow title, […]
Archives: Joy Sawyer Mulligan
What goes around
. . . keeps going around. There’s probably no sense in even trying to find the first link in my personal chain of Shared Lit (not an academic course you can sign up for, but, rather, a course of action, a version of call-and-reponse, of good-reads-as-boomerangs). The latest chapter goes this way: Jackson–a senior–and I […]
Morning Gifts
I teach first period two days a week, and on those Monday and Friday mornings, I typically (and gratefully) find the classroom much cleaner than I left it the day before–thanks to Joanna, Room C’s Morning Jobster Extraordinaire. In the appreciation engendered in me, that neat-and-tidiness is matched by other ephemera: magnetic poetry gifts on […]
Course Cross-pollination
Wrapping up a conversation in English 1. We’ve been talking about the collective antagonist in this Barbara Kingsolver short story–essentially a whole small Southern town most of whose older inhabitants are passing down racist, homophobic narrow-mindedness to the next generation.
Eidetic Memories?
A few weekends back, I heard that the first horse packing trip of the year was leaving from the Ike Livermore Pack Station on Friday before classes were out–so I headed up to see how it all was going (a couple of my students were in the mix). I asked, “Anyone got a camera here […]
Zest
Reply from a 9th grader to an email I sent to the whole school re: start time of our Saturday night Open Home: SO SIKED!!! Spelling, schmelling. Three cheers for unfiltered, unspell-checked enthusiasm.