Everyone stutters occasionally, but only a few of us are stutterers. And those of us who are stutterers don’t always stutter, just as the rest of you don’t always speak perfectly. We all stammer confessing love, but never do if crying out in pain. The well-meaning compliment, “But you’re not stuttering now,” is as hurtful as it is unknowing. A stutterer is always a stutterer, even when silent. There are Egyptian hieroglyphs they say refer to us, and a Babylonian cuneiform that records a stammer amid inventories of grain. There’s the Bible’s Moses, slow of tongue. Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It recites: “I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour his concealed man out of thy mouth...
image source: bigstockphoto.com The numbers 1-2-3 stand for the formula I devised to teach students to develop and demonstrate Critical Thinking Skills. By following the 1-2-3 formula, I teach students to think about their choice of answers. I came up with this strategy as part of my efforts to teach first year college students to answer reading comprehension questions. Historically, I have found that short-answer questions tend to ask students to answer in one or two sentences, which, I think, limit students’ ability to demonstrate critical thinking skills. One or two sentence responses do not really encourage students to explain how they arrive at the answer. The result is usually an answer that can either be easily found in the...
Planning a read-aloud for the classroom or a story time at the library requires us to consider some important features of books. There are so many amazing books for kids but not all of them fit the bill when it comes to a whole group read-aloud. I’m here to help you pick books that will make your next read-aloud session to a group of children a success. Full Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. Picking a Fiction Book to Read Aloud I have an acronym I like to think about when selecting a fiction whole group read-aloud. B- Bold and Bright Pictures I love a good detailed illustrated book with lots of little things to find in the pictures. However,...
“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” Without story, there is no self. For all human beings, internal narrative is the pillar of memory and identity. For the subset of our species who identify as writers, storytelling is the shape we give to our longing to comprehend and connect with the world. “Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, that exquisite specimen of the subset. The storyteller’s role, wrote the exquisite Baldwin, is...
Being a white dad with a white family in a very white town, I’m reminded time and again how keeping justice in the forefront of my kids’ mind is a daily task. Our lives are full of so many distractions – gas prices, Don’t Say Gay laws, Justin Bieber palsy announcements, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with potato chips (not nearly as tasty as you’d hope – just eat mini cups with a few Lay’s simultaneously). Oh and mass murdering of children. I’m not conflating the importance of the Beebs’ facial issues and the murder of children. But our national media definitely mixes them up in order of importance. And let’s not talk about Congress’s inability to serve its constituents instead...
