Today’s post is by guest author Charles Ellenbogen, who is in his 27th year of teaching. He teaches high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and has recently published a teaching memoir, This Isn’t the Movies: 25 Years in the Classroom.
Author: #TeachLivingPoets
Exploring Family Relationships with a sonnet by Terrance Hayes
Today’s post is by guest author Charles Ellenbogen, who is in his 27th year of teaching. He teaches high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and has recently published a teaching memoir, This Isn’t the Movies: 25 Years in the Classroom.
This lesson plan features one of Terrance Hayes’s American sonnets from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, as well as a poem by the Poet Laureate of Ohio, Dave Lucas. Students will compare and contrast the two poems, exploring the father-son relationship in each. This lesson is designed with distance teaching and online learning in mind, and can fit right into any thematic unit on family dynamics and complexities. Continue reading
At the Kitchen Table with Joy Harjo
This is the eighth installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month I’m featuring our current U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She is the first Native American appointed to the position. Her many honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Harjo once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors…to all voices…all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings.” We can see Harjo touch upon several of these in her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” Continue reading
Eduardo C. Corral’s “Border Patrol Agent” lesson
Today’s lesson is brought to you by Joel Garza @JoelRGarza, who chairs the Upper School English department at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. He draws loads of professional growth from #aplitchat #ClearTheAir #DisruptTexts #TeachLivingPoets and #THEBOOKCHAT (which he co-founded with Scott Bayer, aka @LyricalSwordz).
Click HERE to view the lesson made by Joel Garza
Mini-lesson for “Tea” by Leila Chatti
This lesson was inspired by Chatti’s poem and the #TeachLivingPoets Twitter chat about the poem, and was created by the chat host, Kristin Runyon.
Click HERE for the full Hyperdoc
Considering borders, marginalization, & structure with two poems by Philip Metres
Today’s post is by guest author Charles Ellenbogen, who is in his 27th year of teaching. He teaches Language & Literature at Campus International High School in Cleveland, Ohio, and has recently published a teaching memoir, This Isn’t the Movies: 25 Years in the Classroom. As of this writing, he is safe at home with Kirsten, his wife, Zoe and Ezra, his children, and Lincoln and Chocolate Scales, their pets.
Students start with “Marginalia with Uprooted Olives” by Philip Metres from Shrapnel Maps (April 2020, Copper Canyon Press) Continue reading
Food Poem Unit for Online Learning
Everything you need is in this Hyperdoc. What you will find is a task sheet in small daily chunks that includes:
TeachLivingPoets Distance Learning Project
Today’s distance learning project post is by Brian Hannon, who teaches AP Language and Composition, AP Literature and Composition, and English 11 at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria, Virginia. Outside of school, Brian currently serves as the Youth and Education Development Fellow at the Washington D.C. non-profit poetry organization, Split This Rock. He also works part-time for the Ultimate Fighting Championship and as a Muay Thai instructor. In 2018, Brian was a finalist for Fairfax County Public Schools Teacher of the Year and was his conference’s Coach of the Year for Hayfield’s Varsity Tennis Team.
Since we’re stuck at home and have been directed to create lessons that students can complete remotely, I’m sure that many of you feel a bit of pressure to come up with engaging, meaningful lessons that don’t require TOO much oversight from yourselves. I, too, am in that boat, so I just wanted to share an assignment that worked well for me and my students, one that they were able to complete independently. In retrospect, I wish I had assigned this lesson AFTER the closure of school, but I don’t think anybody was prescient enough to predict the pandemic that we now find ourselves in! Continue reading
Distance Learning Podcast Unit
I love making podcasts with my students, so I modified my podcast unit to distance learning needs. Using this hyperdoc, students are walked through a step-by-step process that ends in the final product of creating their own podcast episode.
What the unit includes:
A fully functional hyperdoc you can share with your students and have them complete independently from home (a device and internet connection is needed). Just make a copy and change the due dates to suit your needs.
Mentor text podcast episodes with guiding questions for students to consider Continue reading
Snapshots of the Past with Natasha Trethewey
This is the seventh installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month’s featured poet is Natasha Trethewey, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and inductions into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Trethewey focuses on both the personal and the historical in her work. Academy of American Poets Chancellor Marilyn Nelson said, “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities…Trethewey encourages us to reflect [and] learn….” I’ve chosen her poem “History Lesson” to showcase how artfully she blends the personal with the historical. Continue reading
