Class Extensions

For the last unit of 10th Grade English, groups created short films around the general theme of awkwardness. Students pitched ideas, wrote screenplays, participated in table reads, storyboarded, filmed, edited and screened their films, with interesting and awkward–both intentional and unintentional–results. Every group used iMovie and Celtx screenwriting software.

My 11th grade English class has been studying translated texts by authors–Borges, Murakami, and Marquez–who reference and use labyrinths as symbols in their writing, and we have been working with a semester thematic focus of “Narrative Labyrinths and Infinite Possibilities.” We decided to create a walking labyrinth outside. The guidelines for walking a labyrinth are simple: [...]

From Borges to Cervantes to Shakespeare to Velazquez, many artists have produced works that ask the question of “what happens when fiction lives in fiction?” and experimented with the play-in-play, or painter-in-painting, or novelist-in-novel, and so on, ad infinitum. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception, and in class we have been drawing conclusions [...]

Some praise for Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: “The disappearance of a cat, the return of water, a compelling mystery. A labyrinth you just can’t escape.” –Alex & Selma “A unique and gripping adventure through the subconscious mind, giving insight into modern life. Murakami takes you to another world.” –Rachel & Selma “Compilations of [...]

Try to say that five times fast. For our Chronicle of a Death Foretold reflections, we will use the same requirements as last time, when we wrote about our discussions of J.L. Borges. We have discussed and journaled about the following topics in relation to Marquez’ novella: Analysis of time and place What was easy [...]

In TOK we began to investigate Reason as our Way of Knowing, and how statistics relates to this.  Two people came to mind: Hans Rosling and his website Gapminder.org.  Here is an analysis of statistics by Rosling using his website that is similar to the TED Talk we watched in class: Chris Jordan and his [...]

In order to avoid the dreaded curse of slideuments (presentations that are basically word documents pasted into a PowerPoint and helpful to no one), I wanted to point my students to some handy resources and ideas for creating presentations that are effective, memorable, and visually stimulating. Two helpful websites that write about and compile presentation [...]