The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

Growing up in North Carolina, it was understood that as soon as the Super Bowl was over, we began the countdown to March Madness (which was more important than football anyway). If you are not a follower of college basketball, you might not be aware that North Carolina is a hotbed of college rivalries, most notably between the Duke Blue Devils, the UNC-Chapel Hill Tarheels, and the NC State University Wolfpack.  My family is mixed--my dad's sister attended Chapel Hill, my mom's brother went to NC State, and we even have a few Duke fans mixed in (though  most don't admit to it)-- and the NCAA tournament was a sacred cow in my home growing up. There was to be no changing of the channel from Sweet Sixteen to Final Four! Fast forward to 2017. I hadn't cared about or watched basketball in years, but early in January some friends invited my husband and me to go to Chapel Hill and watch the Tarheels take on the Wolfpack, and it only took one game to tumble us both right do...

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match Find me a find, Catch me a catch. Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book, And make me a perfect match! Yesterday was Valentine's Day. I have little regard for this holiday, and would just as soon ignore the tacky and garish trappings of Pepto-Bismol pink that festoon the aisles of every store during this season, but if you've ever been in a middle school on Valentine's Day, you know it's impossible to pretend it's not happening. The hormonal soup the average 8th grade brain stews in on a daily basis gets turned up to a rolling boil in the week leading up to the holiday, and by 2:15 on 2/14, education seems a lost cause. This year, Valentine's Day got me thinking about my role as a matchmaker. It's kind of what I do. I'm not sure that my algorithm is as sophisticated as Match.com, but at this point in the year I am pretty confident in my matchmaking capabilities. In first period, I know that I can ma...

"Mrs. J, I'm mad. I finished my book." Megan was glaring at the cover of Paper Towns by John Green like it had just insulted her mom. Up to this point, I had been the initiator of any conversations with Megan about her reading, so I was willing to put off my intended conferences for a few minutes to chat with her. I replied, "So tell me about it. What are you upset about?" She looked thoughtfully down at her book, then launched into a furious diatribe about expectations and let-down, about missed signals and clues, about lost love and disappointment.  I listened, bemusedly, surprised at the unexpected passion gushing forth from this reticent student. At our first conference, she told me she had "maybe read a book or two in sixth grade, but nothing I remember," and that she pretty much hated reading. As recently as Thanksgiving break, she was still standing firm in her anti-text stance. Everything she had read so far had been “just alright.” In pr...

I love hiking. For the fifteen years my husband and I have been married, hiking has been one of our “vacation” activities. We both love being outdoors, in uncrowded places that others avoid. I enjoy hiking because of the pay-off: it’s hard work, but I feel rewarded by being able to see things I would have missed out on if I had refused the challenge. Until recently I thought that hiking had to be confined to vacationing, but then I discovered the Vertical Mile Challenge (VMC) at Rocky Face Recreational Park ( www.rockyfacepark.com ). The VMC is close enough to home that I’m able to go most days, and it is one of the most challenging and rewarding hikes I’ve ever attempted.The best (and worst) part is this: it never gets easier. I thrive on attempting things that are challenging, so I guess the tagline for this post should be, “A shout-out to things that never get easier...no matter how many times you do them.”  The trail is a 2.2-mile loop, with one eighth-mile section tha...

One of the blogs I follow religiously is Peter Greene's, Curmudgucation.  Today he posted a great piece called   The Missing Link in the Reading Debate .  After reading it, I thought about some conversations we had yesterday in our staff development.  We were supposed to be looking at "data".  It seems to matter to no one that none of the people on our staff are a. statisticians, b. mathematicians, c. professional researchers, or d. interested in the slightest in becoming experts in one of these fields.  We sat in a staff meeting for a couple of hours last week while various charts and numbers and colorful graphs were thrown up on the screen, apparently all illustrating how greatly our school is failing.  Yesterday we were supposed to be looking more deeply at those numbers and charts and graphs and engaging with them in a productive way to improve our school.  Umm. No. Every one of those charts and graphs and numbers are produced by lookin...

How do I love Jane Eyre ?  Let me count the ways. Because even in the darkest moments of the novel: at the school when the children were told not to talk to Jane, living with the hateful Reeds, being lost and almost starving on the moors, living in the terrible understanding that Rochester was going to marry Miss Ingram, in trying to please St. John and live up to his completely unreasonable expectations, Jane never loses her utter "Jane-ness".  She never loses sight of herself and who she is, and she never wavers in her faith in herself.    Because the love story between Rochester and Jane is almost purely intellectual.  She never seeks to hide her thoughts and feelings from him behind the wall of femininity, and in doing that, she inspires all women to be truly feminist.  Jane speaks her mind and tells the truth, and Rochester loves her all the more because of it.   Because Jane is more beautiful in my head because she sees herself as plai...

The prompt for this posting was "A book turned into a movie and completely desecrated."  I'll be honest and say that I'm having a really difficult time thinking of any books turned movies that I really loved or really hated.  They generally don't have that much of an effect on me.  Certainly there have been a great many movies made from books that do not in any way do justice to the plot.  There are many movies I've seen that are great in their own right, even though they really departed from the book ( To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Book Thief  come to mind).  I guess the only truly abysmal book-turned-movie that  I can think of would have to be The Da Vinci Code . So, yes, I am outing myself that I have read and enjoyed Dan Brown novels.  In fact, when my hubby and I visited Italy, we took the Angels and Demons  tour in Rome.  (An entertaining and informative tour, FYI!)  I know that Brown is a bit of a pattern writer, and ...