“I’ll Fly Away” is my favorite song in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? This version was recorded by the wonderful Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss.
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From the category archives:
Class Extensions
Not only are students lucky and fortunate to participate in an art trip to Italy, but also an art trip to Italy that coincides with La Biennale di Venezia, referred to simply as “La Biennale,” which is a contemporary and avant-garde art exhibition hosted by Venice every two years. Today we visited the part of [...]
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Our last day in Florence was an eventful one, which began by crossing the river Arno over the Ponte Vecchio, walking through the ancient city walls and up the hillside for a magnificent view of the city. This view provided the unique opportunity for students to sketch the cityscape that we have been exploring for [...]
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The beautiful weather continued in Florence as we spent the morning exploring the Uffizi Museum, which houses works by Da Vinci, Botticelli, Lippi and Raphael, among others. Students spent time sketching works in detail and learning from the Italian masters. We then visited the tranquil San Marco Monastery, discovering the beautiful frescos painted directly on [...]
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Upon our arrival last evening, we were welcomed to Florence with beautiful weather and delicious traditional Tuscan cuisine. Today we were on a mission to experience as many churches as time and energy would allow us. We started with a climb up the cupola (dome) of the Duomo–the Cathedral of Santa Maria di Fiore–where we [...]
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I wanted to provide a few “visual illusion” links to some of the example we have been looking at in TOK class (like the illusion above, which is in fact not an animation, except that our mind creates one). This website has quite an impressive collection of them. Below I’ve also embedded a link [...]
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The English and TOK Source Books are intended to be a source of students’ own thinking. In addition to the contents and entries I assign, students should be exploring the Texts we study in new, personal and unique ways. I am using Text with a capital “T,” meaning a novel, poem, film, commercial, advertisement, short [...]
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“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside and look around. . . What do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. . . The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do. . . These people are still part of that system. [...]
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Although I suppose I usually read viewing or reading lists with a very critical eye–especially ones requiring that I do things “before I die”–two lists of these type intrigued me as I was reading the blog Largehearted Boy, one of my favorite places to go in an attempt to keep updated with interesting literature and [...]
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As we continue to explore texts that could fall under the term “Postmodern,” students are investigating the notoriously ambiguous term / genre / movement / party / era / manifesto / belief system of postmodernism by compiling a list of other peoples ideas, which they will then post below.
In Klosterman’s collection of essays titled Sex, [...]
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Aron Ralston’s survival story always provides a nice perspective and debate when investigating what it means to be a hero, and how we define heroism. The video report above mentions that Ralston’s book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, was being optioned into a feature length film. This film, 127 Hours, has [...]
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My 9th grade English students will read the following linked article from The Boston Globe titled “Caught in the act: Juveniles sentenced to Shakespeare,” and then write a Source Book entry titled # 56 “Sentenced to Shakespeare” Response Journal, due on Monday, May 16th. By Friday, May 20th, you will post a comment [...]
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Anne Lamott argues that “very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.” Therefore, she advocates for writing at first without fear of consequences, creating a first drat that is “the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that [...]
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As we begin reading M. T. Anderson’s novel Feed, I wanted to provide some links for students to interact with and comment on that will further introduce some of the concepts that the novel deals with. I’m reminded first and foremost of some work we completed in my TOK course that might be useful to [...]
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