ISS Students

I had the pleasure of attending the Berlin International Film Festival where I was able to see the world premiere of Arvin Chen’s first feature-length film Au Revior Taipei. Last year he came away from the festival with a Silver Bear Award for his short film Mei, which you can watch below in its entirety.  [...]

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A poem inspired by Picasso’s Guernica, and created by my 9th grade English class.  Nice work.

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. . . If you do, you start missing everybody.
A few of the best Salinger pieces I’ve read so far:
Dave Eggers writes for The New Yorker and considers what Salinger has been doing for the last half-century, and how this mystery gets to “the heart of writing iteself . . . given that the nature [...]

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In Part One of this slightly strange documentary, Kurt Vonnegut talks about growing up, writing short stories for the magazines, and then he gets interviewed by his good friend Kilgore Trout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5EqOiye7zI

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A collaborative roadmap (click to enlarge) created by my English 11 class as we begin our study of Antigone:

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Next fall the High School ISS Art Trip will visit three Spanish cities—Madrid, Toledo, and Barcelona—for six packed days and five nights. We will begin our adventure in Madrid, using a half day to also visit Toledo (A beautiful, walled city dating back to the 7th Century BC). From Madrid we will board [...]

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11th Grade English Classes:  Mark your calendars and planners.  Below is the schedule for both my English A2 and A1 courses.  I look forward to some interesting presentations and activities.
Students who have not had a conference with me yet will need to schedule one this week, using the sign-up sheet that is now posted outside [...]

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As my English A1 HL class concludes their first semester of coursework, where we studied what we called the idea of “blurring the lines between fictional realities and autobiographical impulses,” I decided to screen Michele Gondry’s The Science Sleep as a bridge between the prose that we have studied, and the drama texts that we [...]

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In my English A2 class today we concluded our Media Studies Semester by finishing the film Tough Guise, and then watching a presentation by Ji Lee, the creator of the Bubble Project.

I found the project’s “manifesto” interesting:
Our communal spaces are being overrun with ads. Train stations, streets, squares, busses, and subways now scream [...]

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“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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Next week in TOK we will watch this presentation, given by eccentric lexicographist Erin McKean (ironically my spell-check is telling me that “lexicographist” is not a word, which seems fitting).  She also helped start this site called Wordnik:

And today we read this to get us thinking about language, libraries, and how we can connect this [...]

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As we’ve begun to experience some of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry as a class–both from her collection titled The World’s Wife and from her other books–I am curious about the connections that we can make between the poems that we looked at in groups last week: “Medusa,” “Salome,” and “Demeter.”
In a review of The World’s [...]

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