What Now?

Learning Hebrew, redux

I know that I grumped and groaned an awful lot about learning Hebrew in my bat mitzvah class over the past year. Plus, you know, all the tears I shed.

But here I am, diving in again!

I really don't want to lose the Hebrew that I so painstakingly gained, so I talked with the rabbi and then proposed to my mitzvah-mates (a lovely term coined by one of my fellow bat mitzvah folks) that any interested folks could perhaps get together a few times over the summer and read an easy-Hebrew-for-adults storybook. I was amazed that most of the folks in the group said "yes" enthusiastically!

So today one of my mitzvah-mates and I and the rabbi had a little field trip to our local Jewish bookstore to select the book for the group. We settled on a book of Jewish parables. Each of the stories is 2-4 pages long, which will give us a frequent sense of accomplishment. I've already figured out that the first story features a blind man, so I think I'm doing well.

We also needed a Hebrew-English dictionary, of course. My rabbi recommends the Oxford, but the type was too small for me, so I got the Bantam, which is his second choice. I'm now going to have to spend time singing the aleph-bet song, since it turns out that, just as in English, one actually has to remember the order of the letters in order to use a dictionary!

And then, just because we're go-getters, we also bought a much more expensive book that is a language self-study course for English speakers who are traveling to Israel. Hebrew & Israel First Steps has lots of vocabulary and grammar, and each chapter is about a different place in Israel, so there's interesting content as well. It's modern Hebrew, as you'd expect, which means it begins by including all of the vowels but then gradually drops them away. I've been studying my Hebrew vocabulary without vowels for the last two or three weeks, and I'm sort of excited to push myself in this way.

It's perhaps weird that I'm so jazzed about studying Hebrew this summer when I was literally weeping over it last summer, but here is the difference, self-aggrandizing though it may be: The bar/bat mitzvah group's Hebrew teacher was a wonderfully generous woman who was doing the whole thing out of the goodness of her heart but isn't an especially good teacher and who kind of wanted to show off her own Hebrew skills. This summer, on the other hand, I am the de facto leader of this little unofficial group, and I feel confident that I can create a more positive learning climate in which we're all working at our own pace and ability and supporting one another. We shall see if that claim actually bears out.

My move in the game of "Humiliation"

So, you know that game of "Humiliation" that David Lodge invented, in which English academics confess the canonical works that they've never read?

Well, here's my confession: I've actually never read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, sure, I successfully answered a question on it during my comprehensive exams.

I even discussed it in a discursive footnote in my dissertation.

But neither of those things means I've actually read it!

But my colleague who's been teaching AP English Language for the last couple of years included the novel in her course and said it went really well. And next year I'm going back to AP Lang (which is seriously my favorite course, so I'm so happy to be returning to it!). And I'm always looking to give myself a challenge.

So I took a deep breath and put The Grapes of Wrath on my syllabus for next year. My desk copy has now arrived. So all that's left to do is, you know, actually crack it open and read it this summer.

I'm both looking forward to it and also kind of dreading it, in that way that books that one's avoided for decades become larger than life.

Is there a name for this?

You know when you need to use two different prepositions because you have a pair of overlapping prepositional phrases with the same object? As in "hope for and denial of intimacy"? Or "thinking about and wishing for something or other"?

What's that construction called? Anyone know?

 

What else I'm not reading, at least for now: Pedagogy

I went on a bit of a pedagogy-reading kick last spring and summer, and I totally enjoyed it. With colleagues, I read and talked about Grant J. Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design and Ron Ritchhart's Creating Cultures of Thinking. Also, in preparation for the week-long seminar I took on race and inclusion and independent schools, I did a lot of reading about the development of racial identity, especially Beverly Daniel Tatum's Can We Talk About Race? and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Plus, my 9th-grade English teachers and I got together over the summer and significantly revamped a major component of our shared course, and in doing so revamped a bunch of other parts of the course as well.

And this was all good, and I'm glad for the reading and the experiences.

Also, I'm exhausted. I changed things about my teaching and my courses, and I added some new components, and I feel really good about these changes. But it's been lots of work.

So one of the things I did for myself when I didn't get the academic dean position was to promise myself that I could take things a little easier. Today I returned yet another pedagogy book to the library, unread, and it was quite a relief.

Here's the thing: I'm a really good teacher. That doesn't mean I can't be better, and I think it's the responsibility of all teachers to keep honing their craft. But that doesn't mean I need to be doing this honing constantly; rather, I'd like to have seasons of such professional development, and other seasons in which those ideas take root. And, if we keep going with this new metaphor, maybe even other times when I'm letting my craft lie fallow for a bit.

So I'm declaring that this spring -- and maybe this summer and next year as well -- as a time for not continuing to push myself pedagogically but rather letting myself relax into and absorb the changes I've already made. I feel myself unwind even writing those words.

(Sorry for the conglomeration of mixed metaphors in this post. I'm way too lazy to go back and make them all cohere.)

What I'm reading and not reading

What I've read lately:

Book #4: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice -- I love Charles Todd! This one was a Bess Crawford mystery; she's a nurse in WWI. It was okay, but I really like Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries better. They're set immediately post-WWI, and Rutledge returns to Scotland Yard trying to keep his PTSD a secret. 

Book #5: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half -- Love, love this. I was a devoted fan of Brosh's blog by the same name, and I'd been meaning to read her book for ages. So funny and sad and raw and honest.

Book #6: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead -- the first of the Roderick Alleyn mysteries. I had a momentary inspiration to delve into the classic Queens of Crime -- Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham. This mystery was okay but not fabulous, but worth reading more to see if the series picks up. I read some of these when I was young, but the only one I remember is one in which a performance of Macbeth goes horribly badly when, at the end of the play, the actor Macbeth's head really does get cut off and put on a pole.

What I've ditched only partially read:

I decided that, since I'm not going to be academic dean, I didn't have to finish reading Jim Knight's Instructional Coaching. A fine book, but I'm not going to be an instructional coach, so I returned it to the library as a sign of my realigned priorities.

I was continuing with the Ngaio Marsh project and started reading Death in Ecstasy ... and wow, Marsh really hates gay men. I've read a lot of 19th- and early 20th-century novels that have the prejudices of their time (indeed, without such books I wouldn't have had a dissertation!), but the sheer disgust in the tone of this novel is too unpleasant for me to continue. Color me not surprised to then learn that Marsh never married and had female "companions" throughout her life. Protesting too much, hmmm? Anyway, after a few chapters, I decided that there was no point in getting through all of that vileness just for a mystery novel, so I ditched it.

I also had checked out Dorothy Sayers's Nine Tailors and started reading it. I generally like Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but this one has as its central conceit the ringing of church bells, which is described in such technical language that it's really quite tedious. Plus, in the first few chapters there have already been two maps, one a blueprint of the church and one a map of the village, and I know from experience that any mystery that relies on maps so that one tries to figure out who could make it from one building to another in how much time is just no fun for me. I haven't entirely made up my mind to ditch it, but I'm pretty close.

Today is the first day of spring break, so I'm determined to read only books that make me happy! (with the exception of Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, which will be super depressing but must be read because I assigned it to my AP Lit students)

Book #3: Ashley Weaver, Murder at Brightwell

This is a fun, fluffy mystery novel, set among the wealthy in 1930s Britain. The protagonist has a philandering husband whom she's still in love with, sort of, and that was a nice twist on the genre.

My error was in forgetting how fluffy books should be read -- all in one fell swoop, in a delightfully decadent day of lying in bed and inhaling a book whole.

Instead, I read a chapter or two each night at bedtime for a week, and by the end, I didn't really care who had done it; I just wanted the darned book done. 

So this is a half-hearted review, but the problem is not with the fluffy mystery itself -- I'm all in favor of a fluffy mystery! -- but with my lackluster reading of it.

And that is the last book review for a while, because now I return to the big stack of books that are teetering by my bedside, none of them even close to being finished. And we're heading into the last two weeks of the trimester, which means that I'll log a lot of grading hours and very few reading hours.

Book #2: Marjorie Munsterberg, Writing About Art

The second book sort of fell into my lap when an art history teacher friend asked me to take a look at the book and see if it might work well for her AP Art History course. I wound up doing more than "taking a look" but rather reading the whole thing, in large part because I've never read anything about how to write about art and was interested in learning more.

In lieu of a proper review on this blog, here's a portion of the email I sent to her:

Short version: I like Marjorie Munsterberg's Writing About Art! I read it cover to cover this weekend (while avoiding the grading I need to do, naturally). And certainly it's priced right, unlike some very expensive books I saw on Amazon about writing about art. ...

 

Munsterberg's points about writing in her Introduction -- about the paragraph as the organizing unit of an essay, etc. -- completely square with what students are learning in every year of English course. ... I disagree with her about the value of Strunk & White as a writing guide (she likes it; I don't), but it makes no real difference in this book.

 

From what I've seen with your assignments, her emphasis on visual description and stylistic analysis as two major forms of writing about art would work well with what you do in AP Art History. ... I also found interesting her inclusion of some of her own assignments at the end, although these may be less interesting to you since they probably are similar to what you do.

 

I particularly like her inclusion of student examples of different types of essays, and I LOVE her careful revision of the first two essays (81-98). I could imagine as a great class plan giving the students in class the first unrevised sample essay and discussing it and then having them read through her analysis and revision for homework that night. The one thing I don't like about her revisions is that she likes opening lines such as "This paper will be a visual description of ..." or "For this paper I will focus on ...," which I really dislike. But maybe these are fine in art history? ...

One thing that I like about Munsterberg's assignments and that she focuses on in the book (especially in the "Visual Analysis" section) is the difference between SEEING something and KNOWING it because you read it on the museum placard, etc. (5). I notice that her assignments say "NO RESEARCH" for the visual and stylistic analysis essays and that she insists on one's citing any source for any piece of information that one can't SEE from the piece itself. In your students' essays that I read, many of them were clearly relying on the museum information or other sources and struggling with relying on their own SEEING, which I imagine is the perennial struggle for beginning art history students.

 

She also has a separate assignment for a research paper. I don't know if that's something you have your students do in AP Art History, but I like her treatment of the research process. (And she has a nuanced approach to the value of Wikipedia [67], which I appreciate.) Her preferred citation style is Chicago; if you're having your students use MLA, that's something to note.

 

A question that I have after reading this and would love to talk with you about sometime: What's the line between art history/analysis and art appreciation? I tell my students that their goal is to analyze rather than compliment an author, and when we do discuss how well an author has done something (as we just did with the epilogues for Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I and many readers think are weak and should have been left out), I am very clear with them that we're doing something quite different in those moments -- evaluating rather than analyzing. But some of the professional art historians Munsterberg quotes approvingly are essentially analyzing why something is good, and in one of her revisions of a student essay, she allows to stand the student's phrase about an "awesome sunset." (I would have immediately asked, "What do you mean by awesome? Do you mean vivid? Then say that instead.") This question isn't so much about this book as it is about the field of art history that I'd love to know more about.

 Plus, for my own purposes, three quotes that I wanted to write down to come back to later. The first is from Munsterberg herself, the next two from art historians she quotes:

"In effect, writing a visual description consists of two separate acts of translation. The first transforms a visual experience into a verbal one and the second turns a private experience into one that can be communicated to someone else" (4).

Leo Steinberg, writing about Michelangelo's Last Judgment: "Where a copy is manifestly at odds with its model, it not only leads me to see what the copyist missed but what I hadn't noticed. Ours is by nature a pejorative eye, better adapted to registering a mismatch than agreement. The discrepancies that lead to the eye in comparing replicas with their ostensible models are jolts to one's visual sloth" (34).

 John Barrell in The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840: "We should ask ourselves whether we do not still, in the ways we admire Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Constable, identify with the interests of their customers [who purchased these pictures] and against the poor they portray" (44).

Book #1: Debby Irving, Waking Up White

As I mentioned the other day, in the last year or so I've become worse and worse about actually finishing books. I check out and buy tons of books, and then I don't read them. Or, rather, I start them and then pile them up beside my bed until the stack gets too high and falls over. Then I return them to the library or put them on a bookshelf. And the cycle continues with new books.

I'm totally fine with ditching books partway through if I'm not liking them, but that's not the situation here. It's more like I don't seem to have the intellectual wherewithal or the discipline to pay attention to keep going. I want to change that pattern I've fallen into. So I'm going to blog about each book I finish this year, in hopes that this will prompt me to finish more of them. (And books I'm teaching don't count.)

So here's Book #1: Debby Irving, Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Cambridge: Elephant Room Press, 2014).

Debby Irving is a self-described New England WASP who started figuring out how white privilege works at the age of 50. This book is memoir-ish in that she talks about her various awakenings and mistakes along the way to a greater understanding of structural racism. She's not an amazing writer, but it's an engaging book, and she has questions at the end of each chapter to help folks who are on their own journey toward understanding. She's especially good on the phenomenon of well-meaning white people.

This book has gotten an unusual amount of attention for a self-published book. I first heard about it last summer at the diversity workshop I went to, and Debby Irving seems to have become a fixture at various conferences and workshops for independent schools and diversity. I'm not entirely sure why -- she doesn't seem connected with independent schools at all -- and maybe she has a broader reach that I don't know about. I think some churches and synagogues are reading it as well. The book is very popular right now in at least the small corner of the world I inhabit.

Anyway, I accidentally sort of started a reading-about-race group of faculty & staff at FGS this year, and we decided to read Irving's book this winter. Irving is either on the lecture circuit right now or at least was going to be in our area doing a talk, and so several folks were interested in reading it. About 20 adults at FGS got the book (generously paid for out of the Multicultural Coordinator's budget), and about 12 gathered to have a conversation about it. And I had been asked to facilitate that conversation -- the reason that I'd actually finished this book instead of letting it languish in the pile with the other half-read books!

I didn't learn all that much from reading it, but then again I've been thinking about and studying race for a pretty long time. (Race and racism in America played a vital role in my dissertation.) But some of the folks in the group learned A LOT, so that right there says something important about this book. She's also really understanding of the fear of saying something stupid that keeps white people silent, which I know for a fact had been dogging some folks in the group. So I think that this book can be wonderful for groups of white people (which this self-selected group of FGS adults was) who want to push through that fear and develop greater cultural competence. I'm thinking of recommending it to my synagogue, which is having a series of conversations about race this year.

Finally, it would have done both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders a world of good to have read Debby Irving's book before Thursday night's debate! 

My good deed this week, and the thoughts it's inspired

Last week, I spent several hours in a van with some colleagues as we drove to and then from a class retreat that we were all chaperoning. (The students were on two big busses from a local bus company, but we always need to have a separate vehicle in case of emergencies -- taking a student to the doctor or something like that. And that was the vehicle that I and some fellow teachers were riding in.)

Conversation turned, as it often does, especially at the start of the year, to teaching. I still remember fondly a fabulous hours-long conversation about pedagogy that I had with colleagues last year on my way to the sophomore retreat. This year's conversation on the way to the junior retreat wasn't nearly as fabulous -- mostly because of who happened to be in the van -- but it did lead to a teacher's confessing that she was completely out of her depth in trying to teach writing. She's an art teacher who is now also teaching art history; it's a writing-intensive course, but she's never had any training in teaching writing, and she said she just didn't know what she was doing.

She asked me how I had learned to teach writing, but honestly I mostly learned by being thrown into composition classrooms with no preparation and talking with other grad students in the same situation, or a year or two ahead who had learned from mistakes. We had a class on teaching writing, but I don't recall actually learning anything useful from it (or maybe it was useful and I just don't remember because I was so overwhelmed that first year especially). The most helpful part of my first year of teaching writing was that I was paired with a mentor, an actual composition lecturer, who observed my class a couple of times and who went over a set of papers with me as I was grading them.

I told my colleague all of this on the bus, and she said, "wow, it would be wonderful to have such a mentor," and without even thinking about it, I said, "I'll do it."

And sure enough, on Wednesday morning she sent me an email to say that she'd gotten her first set of art history essays, and had I really meant it when I said I'd go through a set of essays with her? She gave me an option to bail on the project, which was nice of her, but teaching writing is something that I'm actually passionate about, so I said I'd be happy to do it. And that's how I found myself marking up and grading ten art history essays (short -- only a couple of pages each) this week, even though I had my own grading to be doing as well. 

I'll confess that I totally neglected my own grading for my own students to read her essays, because they were more interesting to me! They were descriptions, analysis, and interpretations of a work of art they'd looked at closely that summer, so each one was different; also, her students were seniors, whereas I was supposed to be grading paragraphs from my freshmen. It was also interesting to me to be watching myself grade and thinking about what it was that I was doing so that I could tell my colleague about my process.

I gave her the set of commented-up essays on Friday morning, and then we got together for about 40 minutes over lunch and talked about the kinds of things I'd said on the student essays. She told me that, across the board, I'd suggested lower grades than she would have given the students. Partly she and the other art teachers have basically no experience in giving grades; I don't think I've ever seen an art grade lower than a B+ at FGS, other than for AP Studio Art. Partly she sees her job as being a cheerleader for students and rewarding them for what they do well -- as do I! -- but she hasn't experienced the other side of teaching, which is holding students to a high standard and giving them the resources and help they need to achieve that standard. She certainly found that idea compelling, but the thought of actually doing it seemed to be making her feel a bit squeamish, even after I recommended giving her students the low grades on the first essay (ranging from one B+ to mostly B-'s and C+'s or C's, and then one C-) and having them rewrite the essays for a new grade. It will be interesting to see what she actually winds up doing. I've offered to meet again at least a few times this term.

I worked hard on her essays (in part because I had to look up each piece of art and examine it myself before I read the student essay on it) and in my meeting with her, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. It felt good to do something metacognitive and intellectually stimulating that I hope is going to help a colleague and our students.

The whole experience made me think again about the possibilities of someday being an academic dean. Our own dean is probably going to retire in a year or two ... and thank goodness, since she's a really nice human being but really not very good at her job, at least in the ways that the faculty would like an academic dean to be. She seems to do a lot more writing of reports (and demanding that others write reports) than actually improving the academics at our school. I'd never want to be academic dean the way that she is, but I'd love to be in a position where it was my job to help people become better teachers, as I was doing with my colleague this week.

I came home yesterday and told D. about the whole experience and my thinking about academic dean positions for some time in the future ... and she pointed out that any management role wasn't just about helping eager people to do better but also dealing with people who are happy not doing their jobs well and who would resent any interference. True. And I do really hate open conflict, and that has to be part of any managerial situation.

Plus, my colleague asked me some questions specifically because I'm NOT in a position of authority over her, so I was a safe person to confide some of her fears in. Plus, this colleague and I have a particular relationship as co-workers that goes back years (we were for six years co-advisors of the arts/literature magazine), which obviously wouldn't be the case with most people. I can think of more than one colleague off the top of my head who would tell me to go jump in a lake if I made any suggestion about pedagogy!

So, okay, maybe being an academic dean is not in my future after all. But I do wish that there were some role at FGS that had the specific job of helping people become better teachers if they were interested in doing so. Something like I imagine this to be, without so much hoopla. (Also, I dislike the word "innovation" in such circumstances, as though only something new can be good, when we might sometimes be better off returning to or reimagining something older. In this case, I imagine that "innovation" is code for technology, which also annoys me.)

When I was talking about all of this with D., she said that it sounded to her like what I wanted to be was not an academic dean but rather a consultant, someone who gets invited into a school to help people figure something out. That actually sounds kind of appealing to me, and in fact it's something that my department head has suggested to me more than once, but I have no idea at all what a consultant does and how one sets up to be one. I think being a consultant requires a strong dash of entrepreneurial spirit, and I have about zero of such spirit.

Finally, I kind of like the idea of writing a book called "How to Teach Writing" ... except that I don't really know how to articulate how I teach writing. I'm not sure I've got enough meta-awareness of my own pedagogy to be able to say anything useful.

Anyway, it's ridiculously like me to be swamped in the first week, teaching an overload, and to be thinking, "Hey, what else could I do?" as though I didn't already have plenty on my plate.

No matter what else happens, I'm glad I did a good deed this past week, and I hope that my colleague is feeling more confident about the teaching she's doing.

Freshman English

I'm teaching half of the 9th-graders next year, just as I did this year. Three sections of a single course is a lot, and, dadgumit, it can be boring. It's especially boring because the 9th-grade books have been exactly the same ever since I've been at FGS. They're fine books, ones that I've enjoyed teaching, but the thought of doing the exact same thing for the fifth time through was getting me down. (Those are the books on the right; click to embiggen.)

Plus, I read Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design with a group of teachers this spring, and I'm going to take it seriously in my planning for next year. Wiggins and McTighe are really big on "essential questions" (here's a nice set of examples, and here's another, if you go to the "additional essential questions" file at the bottom of the page), and I was realizing that the books we were using in the 9th-grade class really didn't hang together for me in terms of an overarching set of questions. I'm sure they did for the two teachers who came up with the list of books a decade ago, but I've honestly never heard either of them say anything substantive about the big picture for the course, so I don't know what they were thinking. Mostly we talk about the skills we want students to learn in 9th grade, which we're all on the same page about, but I think I could teach those same skills well with any number of books!

At the same time, I've finally realized (and it took me long enough) that my desire for things to stay fresh and challenging is pretty much diametrically opposed to most of the department, which prefers to keep things mostly as they are. Certainly my colleagues are always rethinking assignments and how to work best with students, so I'm not casting any stones at all here; I'm just somehow more restless than anyone else seems to be. This makes my longed-for goal of alternating the courses I teach every couple of years mostly doomed to failure, but there's another possibility: changing up the books I teach within any given course. I was talking with a public school teacher friend this spring, and she told me that her department has a list of books for each year (i.e., the 9th-grade list, the 10th-grade list, etc.), and that the deal is that teachers can teach any combination of books from the respective list for their courses. Aha!

So this spring I proposed that our department do the same thing -- choose a set of books for grades 9 through 11 that we could choose from, structured so that we're not treading on one another's toes in different grades. (And then the various 12th grade electives can teach anything that the students won't have read in previous years.) And the department said "yes"! Hurrah! So now I can change up books, and other people can keep exactly the same books, and everyone's happy.

Of course, it turns out that I'm pretty much the only person who is changing anything, which is undoubtedly because (a) the 9th-grade curriculum was always the most structured, with more room for teachers' individual choices already built into the later courses, and (b) as already noted, I'm the most restless member of the department.

So here are the new books for my 9th-grade Lit for next year. You'll notice that we're still starting with The Count of Monte Cristo, since that's the required summer reading for all incoming 9th graders. (It's a novel I'd never read until I started teaching the freshmen, and it's actually a darned good novel that the students really like. We teach an abridged version.)

I'm also keeping The Catcher in the Rye. It's a wonderful, important novel, but I want to teach it later in the year, when the students and I have developed a rapport and a trust. There's a lot about grief and identity and not fitting in, and I always felt like it was pushing things too fast to teach it in the first term, sort of like meeting someone for the first time and asking them within five minutes about their deepest fears and secrets. Sure, that happens occasionally, and it's fabulous when it does, but it's too much to expect that this will work well with all 45 14-year-olds.

And the other books are all new, and I'm so excited! I love teaching graphic novels, and I think Persepolis is going to be a good choice for our first book to read together. And then My Antonia; I'm already verklempt, just thinking about teaching this beloved novel that I haven't gotten to teach in years and years.

Those two new books are made possible because I've dropped The Odyssey, which I actually enjoyed teaching very much but which is incredibly long. The two main goals in teaching it were always (a) it's traditional and canonical, damn it, and (b) to coincide with their Western Civ course's emphasis on ancient Greece and Rome. So I'm swapping it out for Antigone, which is also traditional and canonical, also about ancient Greece, but wow, so much shorter! And I like the idea of giving 9th-graders a few more literary voices in their course than the four they have had in past years. Plus, here's a wacky idea: instead of four male authors, how about four men and two women, one of whom is a woman of color? It's still not a great example of diversity, but at least it's getting better.

Plus, I'm subbing in The Tempest for Macbeth. And there will be short stories and poems around the edges. And if my sense of timing is correct (which it may not be), there will be a little time at the end of the year for some free-choice reading, which I'm excited about.

Here's my idea about how all of this fits together: I'm calling the course "Coming of Age, Coming to Wisdom." And here's my first stab at coming up with essential questions for the course:

• How do we form and shape our mature, authentic identities? How does what we know of the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• What turning points determine our individual pathways to adulthood? What does it mean to “grow up”? How does the meaning of adulthood change or remain the same as one moves between cultures and times?
• How do people navigate the relationship between society’s values and their own individual values within that society?
• How can literature help us to grapple with these questions? How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period? What is the role of art?

Indeed, this is my first stab at writing essential questions ever (how is that possible?), so I'm going to have to sit with these and think on them before I commit to them. And I'm totally open to feedback about them! It's possible that I've got too many of them, or that they're too broad (especially that last bullet point). I also know that they won't be immediately engaging to 9th-graders, so I'm going to need a hook to pull them in.

Can we also just have a moment to recognize that this is the first time ever that I've done any real planning for the year ahead in early June?! I mean, the old school year isn't even over yet! This is what happens when I finish my comments early, as I did this year, and I have the excitement of new books to look forward to! (Plus, this afternoon I was trying not to fall asleep, so it was either this or clean out the fridge.)