LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Nominate Someone for a Golden Apple

SEVEN OUTSTANDING TEACHERS FROM NEW MEXICO MIDDLE SCHOOLS WILL BE AWARDED GOLDEN APPLES The Golden Apple Foundation of New Mexico will honor seven middle/junior high school teachers in 2006 with the Golden Apple Award. Anyone may nominate a teacher. Nomination forms can be found at www.goldenapplenm.org.  Golden Apple Foundation values the diversity of New Mexico and encourages recognition of teachers working with diverse populations and who are themselves from diverse backgrounds.

Golden Apple Award includes…
• Paid professional development
• $1,500 cash award
• Intel-donated personal computer
• Membership in the prestigious Golden Apple Academy
• Annual institutes with other Golden Apple winners

Nominees must be…
• Currently teaching fulltime in an accredited public or non-public middle or junior high school
• Have taught a minimum of six years in New Mexico
• Committed to continue teaching for a minimum of two years after receiving the award
• Nominated no later than NOVEMBER 22, 2005.

Awards Presented at the Tribute to Teacher Excellence, April 2006

American Life in Poetry, October 27, 2005

Beginning today, we'll be publishing U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's weekly column, American Life in Poetry.  Each column features a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser.  Consider sharing Kooser's selections with your students. 

American Life in Poetry
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. Here she perfectly captures a moment in childhood that nearly all of us may remember: being too small for the games the big kids were playing, and fastening tightly upon some little thing of our own.

Boy and Egg

Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering
hens. He too could make
a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear while the other children
laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,
so little yet, too forgetful in games,
ready to cry if the ball brushed him,
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist,
not ready to give it over to the refrigerator
or the rest of the day.

Reprinted from "Fuel," published by BOA Editions by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye, whose most recent book is "A Maze Me" Harper Collins/Greenwillow, 2004. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

 

Remembering Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks died today at the age of 92.  There are a number of good books about her, for children as well as teens and adults.  Some of the best are Rosa Parks:  My Story (an autobiography she wrote with Jim Haskins); Faith Ringgold's If a Bus Could Talk:  The Story of Rosa Parks (in which the bus actually does talk); a new version, Rosa, by well-known poet Nikki Giovanni; and Rosa Parks by Douglas Brinkely, a biography for adults (but accessible to teens) in the popular Penguin Lives series. 

Our New Look

As you can see, we've changed our design.  Hope you like it.  Feel free to send us your praise or protests.  (Use the email link at the bottom of the left margin.)

Writing in the Aftermath

As hurricane Wilma hammers Florida, there might be some consolation in reading about a small good thing that has been occurring in the aftermath of Katrina.  From the Associated Press by way of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Writing helping young Katrina survivors
By Martha Irvine, AP National Writer

A high school senior, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, sits down to write about the journey that brought her from the chaotic shelter at the New Orleans Superdome to Tulsa, Okla., where she still feels lost and alone.

A college freshman whose family fled safely from Katrina recounts how she ended up on a New Orleans causeway overpass, helping evacuees with medical problems.

And, watching the disaster and rebuilding efforts from afar, middle schoolers in southern Illinois send handwritten letters to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in hopes that he will pass them on to others their age.

"I just learned something from this, after seeing all of this," Allie Dean, a sixth-grader in Mount Carmel, Ill., wrote. "I really need to count my blessings and stop asking for stuff. I need to care more about other people and not just myself. Everybody here, including me, cares about you and your families."

In the weeks since hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, sitting down with pen and paper or fingers on keyboard has helped many young people digest what's happened. For some, it's been a way to vent or express sympathy and support for disaster victims.

Those too young to write have been encouraged to draw pictures or take part in "play therapy," allowing them to act out what they're feeling.

"Many of these children have witnessed horrific and almost apocalyptic scenes. I'm seeing a lot of shock - but I'm also seeing a lot of hope," says Eric Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who returned to help young people in Louisiana, where he'd been a school counselor.

In Baton Rouge, faculty and students at Louisiana State University quickly organized the Katrina Writing Project, offering evacuees of all ages a notebook to write down their thoughts or compose poetry - whatever they wanted. Before long, people were seeking out volunteers to ask for a notebook.

Read the rest here.

 

Best Books

TIME Magazine has published a list of what their book reviewers consider to be the hundred greatest novels published (in English) since 1923 (the year TIME was launched).  All the titles you'd expect to see are present--The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird--but there are plenty of off-beat picks as well.  Have you read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash?  How about Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or Martin Amis's Money?  They're on the list too.  The most surprising pick might be Judy Blume's Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret, as lists of this sort seldom include books written for young readers.  You can see all one hundred here.

Harry Potter U.

From the Eugene [Oregon] Register-Guard and the Associated Press:

SALEM, Mass. - Hundreds of Harry Potter fanatics turned this historic seaport, best known for its witches and their trials, into a makeshift college campus fit for a young wizard.

In hotel ballrooms, professors from real-world universities led panel discussions with titles such as ''Bucolic Bullionism: Economics in the Wizarding World,'' ''Christianity and Harry Potter'' and ''Introduction to Spell Writing.''

On the city's common, students braved rain showers for a muddy game of Quidditch - minus the floating broomsticks.

Fans dressed as Lord Voldemort, Draco Malfoy and, of course, Harry Potter drew stares from tourists as they wandered through the streets of Salem's historic district.

The ''Witching Hour,'' a serious-minded five-day symposium on all things Potter that ended last week, suggests that adults may get as much from J.K. Rowling's series of novels as the young people who line up at midnight whenever a new book hits stores.

The Potter books chronicle the life of Potter and his cohorts as they attend Hogwarts, a magical boarding school.

''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,'' the most recent volume, had sold 11 million copies in the United States as of September. Potter books have now been translated into 63 languages, most recently Farsi. Worldwide sales top $300 million.

Read more here.

Things to Do With Books

Here, from California English teacher Jim Burke (via PBS's Reading Rockets site), are "103 Things to Do Before/During/After Reading":

1.  Pantomime
Act out a scene you choose or the class calls out to you while up there.
2. Dramatic monologue
Create a monologue for a character in a scene. What are they thinking/feeling at that moment? Why?
3. Dramatic monologue
Create a monologue for a character while they are out of the book. Where are they? Why? What are they thinking?
4. Business card Book
Write the story in the most compelling way you can on paper the size of a business card.
5. Postcard
Write to a friend, the author, or to a character about this book. Write as if you were the character or author and write to yourself.
6. Mapmaker
Draw a map of the book's setting.
7. Moviemaker
Write a one page "pitch" to a producer explaining why the story would or would not make a great movie.
8. Trailer
Movie previews always offer a quick sequence of the best moments that make us want to watch it – storyboard or narrate the scenes for your trailer. Focus on verbs.
9. Billboard
As in the movies, take what seems the most compelling image(s) and create an ad.
10.  Adjective-itis
Pick five adjectives for the book or character(s), and explain how they apply.
11. Collage
Create an individual or class collage around themes or characters in the book.
12.  Haiku/Limerick
Create one about a character.

The other ninety-one can be found here.  You can also visit Burke's excellent web site, englishcompanion.com.

Wayne Booth Dies at 84

Wayne Booth, an important figure in English education in the second half of the twentieth century, has died.  A faculty member at the University of Chicago, his books included The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago, 1961); A Rhetoric of Irony (University of Chicago, 1974); and The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (University of California, 1988).

From the October 11, 2005 New York Times: 

To many earlier critics, notably the New Critics of the mid-20th century, literature was meant to exist in a kind of social vacuum, to be described critically in terms of the text, and only the text. But to Professor Booth, literature was not so much words on paper as it was a complex ethical act. He saw the novel as a kind of compact between author and reader: intimate and rewarding, but rarely easy. At the crux of this compact lay rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion.

The author's task, he argued, was to draw readers into the web of narrative and hold them there. The critic's task was to tease out the specific rhetorical devices - linguistic, stylistic, symbolic - by which this was accomplished. To describe the intricate, shifting dance between author and reader, he coined a number of critical terms that are now common parlance, among them "implied author" and "unreliable narrator."

Where his early work explored the use of rhetoric in narrative, his later work considered diverse forms of communication, from political discourse to television commercials. In a sense, his books are users' manuals, explaining why these forms work as evocatively as they do.

"He made rhetoric into a way to deal with so many of the problems of the modern world," James Phelan, Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "He took that work, which was really about the ways in which authors communicate to readers, and began to think more broadly about the ways in which people on different sides of ideological divides can communicate with each other."

You can read the rest here (registration required).

Writing Contest: Teachers Against Prejudice

Teachers Against Prejudice has announced its sixth annual essay contest for high school and middle school students.  The deadline is December 16, 2005.  The first prize for each division is a $150 U.S. Savings Bond. Here are the topics:

High School Question:     In the last year or so, the media has reported on a wide range of events. These include the war in Iraq, the bombings in London and Madrid, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the impact of fundamentalism, same-sex marriage and civil unions, and more local issues.  What do you notice about the kinds of stories that get reported the most? Do you think bias/prejudice plays a role in what does or does not get covered or what is under-reported? Explain. Identify and discuss one or two issues or events that, in your opinion, have been under-reported. Why do you think these issues or events are important and what can be done to improve media coverage?         
Please limit your essay to 750 words or less.         

Middle School Question:     Movies and TV programs often show discrimination and prejudice against a race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, the disabled, or other group of people. Some movies and TV programs successfully demonstrate how hurtful discrimination can be. Others totally ignore this fact and may even increase hate and bias.  Animated movies and cartoons on TV feature a wide-range of characters. In your opinion, do you think popular cartoons, animated series, or animated films instill prejudice in young minds or combat prejudice? Please cite at least two sources (they can be cartoons, animated films or an animated series) and explain your answer. If TAP were going to publish a list of films and TV programs young people should see, would you want your choices included or excluded? Why or why not?         
Please limit your essay to 600 words or less.

For more information, click here.