This year on Moving Writers, I’ve spotlighted re-reads of some older books about writing, and not all of them by teachers. Together, we examined the writer’s inner life with the poet Ted Hughes, practiced memory writing with the book Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and honed our questions for conferring with the wonderful Barry Lane. […]
Mentor Text: Leading Us To Revelation: On Rita Dove by Jericho Brown Techniques: Background – I’ve had a subscription to POETRY Magazine for a few years now. And I almost never finish an issue. Issues travel with me in my school bag. Issues are lugged to dance and swim practices in my satchel. Issues can usually […]
Mentor Text: Elegies for Lost Voices – four poems by Scott Nolan. Techniques: Background – Maybe this is because I spent time last night listening to Gordon Lightfoot in the wake of his passing. Maybe it’s because I need to prep a lesson plan for next week in my Lit class where we’re writing about music […]
Placing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and Craig Santos Perez’s “Good Fossil Fuels” side by side can elicit a wide-ranging classroom conversation about the ways the climate crisis is downplayed. Through describing points of convergence and divergence, students can ponder how the “recycled” aspects of Smith’s syntax and prosody appearing in Perez’s poem challenge their thinking […]
Mentor Text: Fairy-tale Logic by A.E. Stallings Techniques: Background – In my Grade 9 class right now, we’re working on our essays discussing scary stories. We do a little short film study, allowing us to practice analysis skills, and give us some fun ground to cover in an early essay this semester, learning the ropes of […]
Mentor Text: Top Down by Scott Nolan Techniques: Background – For the last few years, second semester has held a nice treat for me as an English teacher, my Lit class. There’s something special about teaching the course that students have chosen to be in. It’s a Grade 11 & 12 split, which means we split […]
Mentor Text: The Night Attendant at the Gas Station by Michael Penny Techniques: Background – I’m going to pass along what may seem like a somewhat pithy piece of teaching advice. Zero inbox is your friend. Since school resumed after the holidays, I delete or file everything almost instantly. (professionally and personally) It also means that […]
Mentor Text: My Father’s Moustache by Ada Limon Techniques: Background – As I write this, I still have a few days left of the holiday break. We taught until mere days before Christmas, but have the whole first week of January off. It’s been a period of necessary recharging and relaxation in our household. In fact, […]
Mentor Text: Chiaroscuro by Billy Corgan Techniques: Background – You may have noticed that I’ve settled into a bit of a rhythm in my Mentor Text Wednesday posts, alternating between prose and poetry. I may have mentioned this before, but perhaps 5 years ago or so, I really felt I wanted to do poetry better in […]
Sometime during the first week of school this year, I taped this note to my desk: I wanted this year to be different. Not just different than the last few years of COVID School, but different than all the other years of my teaching that valued efficiency and productivity almost above all. (I love efficiency. […]
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