Happy New Year everyone! I should be grading essays, but instead I'm updating my LJ and watching Gilmore Girls. Procrastination ftw! Have I mentioned how much I don't want to go back to work on Monday? It's almost time to start teaching Shakespeare, ugh. I was never a fan of Shakespeare and I never paid any attention to the plays we read in high school, so I'm really struggling with having to teach
Julius Caesar next month. I was generally a good kid, too, and I've always loved English. So if I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for iambic pentameter, how can I expect my students to? I know my students. They're not going to have any interest in putting in the work needed to really understand Shakespeare.
I think one thing that really bothers me about this is that I have no choice in the matter. The standards I'm covering have to do with character development using asides, soliloquies, and monologues, and with comparing/contrasting character development in a play to character development in other literary forms. Okay, fine. But why do I specifically have to use
Julius Caesar? Who decided that
Romeo and Juliet (9th),
Julius Caesar (10th),
Hamlet (11th), and
Macbeth (12th) were the "high school Shakespeare canon," for lack of a better term. That's what I was told when I asked why I was required to teach JC - because it's part of what "they" (and who is "they," anyway) think high schoolers should be exposed to. Come on! Those are the same four Shakespeare plays
I read when
I was in high school! I'm not that old, but I do no that students of my day were a completely different breed than the ones I'm teaching now. What worked for my generation - and I'm not entirely sure it actually worked, because I sure didn't retain a whole lot of Shakespeare knowledge -
will not work for these kids. I don't understand why I can't tailor the reading selections to fit the needs of my students. I mean, as long as I'm covering the standards, why not? I don't feel like they even need to read an entire play. They certainly don't have the academic stamina for five acts that they have to translate into plain English before reading. Why not just use selections from various plays, if I'm required to teach Shakespeare. Or give them a selection of plays from which to choose and do literature circles?
Okay. I'm going to stop whining and close this with one of my New Year's Resolutions: go back to teaching middle school for the next school year. I miss it. A lot. My other two resolutions?
--Watch every episode of Gilmore Girls that I haven't yet seen. That would be seasons 4 though 7.
--Read all the books on my "To Be Read" pile.
And the real point of this post...
Books Read In 2008:*Twilight: Stephenie Meyer
*New Moon - Stephenie Meyer
Next - Michael Crichton
*Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Mildred Taylor
*Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer
*Crank - Ellen Hopkins
^The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct - Ross Bernstein
*Valiant - Holly Black
*Peeps - Scott Westerfeld
My Best Friend's Girl - Dorothy Koomson
^The Camera My Mother Gave Me - Susanna Kaysen
*Miracle's Boys - Jacqueline Woodson
Summer Knight (Book 4 of The Dresden Files) - Jim Butcher
^Savage Inequalities - Jonathan Kozol
^One Day at Fenway - Steve Kettman
*So Yesterday - Scott Westerfeld
^Have You Found Her – Janice Erlbaum
*Breaking Dawn – Stephenie Meyer
Family History - Dani Shapiro
*Ironside - Holly Black
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic - Sophie Kinsella
*Gossip Girl - Cicely Von Ziegesar
*Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
*The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
*=young adult lit
^-non-fiction"Adult" books: 10
YA Lit: 14
Fiction: 19
Non-fiction: 5
Total books read in 2008: 24
Books to read in 2009:Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
Death Masks (Book 5 of The Dresden Files) - Jim Butcher
The Amber Spyglass (Book 3 of His Dark Materials) - Philip Pullman
The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Innocence - Kathleen Tessaro
The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
The Jane Austen Book Club - Karen Joy Fowler (I started this one and then put it down, but I'll give it another chance)
Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I'm going to finish this if it kills me!)
Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything - Charles P. Pierce (I finally got it! YAY!)
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Last Days - Scott Westerfeld
A Tale of Two Cities - The 2004 Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry and the War for the Pennant - Tony Massaroti (another one that I'm giving another chance; I stopped halfway through because it was too statistic-ey and not enough human interest for me)
Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top - Seth Mnookin
The Host - Stephenie Meyer
And now, pimping time. The best internet find of last year was Paperback Swap. It's just like it sounds - a site where people can go to swap books! You post books you have available, people request them, and then you mail them. You pay the postage, and in return you get a credit. You can then use your credits to request books from other people, and they pay the postage to send the book to you. There are a jabillion books on the site and you save a ton of money on books this way. There are guidelines for the kind of condition the books should be in, too, so you won't get something that's gross and falling apart - although they are used books, so they're not impeccable or anything. It's so worth a look. Click the link to check it out.
I won't lie; this is a bit of self-promotion: if you follow the link and then sign up and post books, I get some credits. Of if you don't use the link but wind up signing up anyway, I'd love it if you'd name me as your referral source. My PBS nickname is "trinnifer."
