Recently a fellow teacher started teaching modernism.  When starting the lecture she had her students sit on the tops of the desks while putting their books in their seats.  I liked the idea, so I tried it with my students, just to give them a better feel of the modernist experience (breaking the rules just because there are are rules to break).

In doing so I found that they were much more attentive.  In fact, they were more responsive across the board. I think I will have my students do this frequently.

If you find this idea obvious or a little odd, just know that it was more for me than for you.  ; )

I would love to have more little tips like this.  Please leave any ideas as comments.

I am sorry I am posting this, but I discovered this website last night and have been enthralled by it since. It is a site devoted to the music videos from the days when MTV really showed music. Since I was only 1 year, 3 months, and 1 day old when it first aired, I can remember watching the videos of the Buggles and The Cars.

Though this has little to do with education, thought you would enjoy satiating your suppressed nostalgia. Perhaps you could show the Thriller video. You can even pick from the long or short versions.

To see more posts about how to use BUBBL.US, go HERE

To read more posts on my blog about The Great Gatsby CLICK HERE.

Below you will find wordles of each of the chapters in The Great Gatsby. In case you are not familiar with wordle.net, it takes texts and gives a visualization of the most frequently used words. The bigger the word, the more frequently it is used.

HERE is a link to other posts dealing with The Great Gatsby.

(To see a wordle for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, click HERE.)

CLICK on the thumbnails to see a larger version.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Please let me know how you use these in lessons and writing assignments. I think other readers would appreciate it.

Ben Davis

This is a wordle based on the text of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I have considered making it an assignment in which students have to pull contrasting words from the cloud and write a paper about them.

Click on the picture to see the picture.

Click HERE to see a wordle for THE GREAT GATSBY

If you will be in Alabama this weekend, kick that banjo off your knee and join us for ACTE’s conference.  This year it will be held in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama.  It has been reported that there will be a room where T.V.s will be set up to catch the latest football scores. (If you are not from the south, you will not understand–it is a religion.  You think I am kidding, don’t you?)

Click on the picture below to see the big names for this year.

This is the best explanations of modernism I have ever found (you can find the original source HERE).  John Lye of Brock University gives a concise explanation of this literary period.

If you want to read some information on literary theory and analysis techniques, visit THIS PAGE, which contains more explanations by Lye.

I had my students paraphrase this text into their own words to give them exposure to academic writing.  I have embedded my worksheet below.

To zoom in, double click in the window below.

It has been a while since I have posted here at TeachEng.Us because I have been focusing on teaching them (my students).  During my time away, I have discovered a number of useful sites that can be useful in the classroom.  One of these is called RSS Mixer, which is in its alpha right now.  I am thinking this will catch on because it allows you to take RSS feeds and to put them all together with just a few clicks.  Then you can change the feed into a widget (for Apple or Yahoo!), a mobile phone application, or even–my favorite–HTML code.  This would allow you to have a constant feed on your website of current events or information from other classroom-relevant websites.

Here is an example of a list I created from some of my favorite teacher blogs:

If you have students read current events, have students write blog responses for you, or use RSSable websites for your classroom, I would give this a try.

Again, they are in their alpha stage, which means they are testing and working out the kinks, but I think this could prove very useful for personalized RSS widgets that are easily embeddable into websites or blogs.