Colleen’s Blog

This week I have been thinking a lot about how different the high school classroom has become from that which it was 10 years ago when I first entered it. This generation of high school students has always been exposed to the Internet and computers, and as a result of this, our high school classrooms need to reflect the technological world that we live in.

This February I went to a teacher’s conference for the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. One of the sessions that I attended talked about this very situation, and talked about incorporating blogs into the classroom in order to provide what the speaker referred to as a collaborative community. I love this picture of students sharing their thoughts about a particular book, play, or a discussion in class on a class website. Classroom blogging allows students to practice forming opinions and articulating them in front of their peers. I think that this set up is especially helpful for students who are a little more apprehensive about speaking up in class.

One thing that I question about blogging as a class is grading my students. I would want my students to feel write whatever they would like on the blog, but I want their contributions to still be well thought out and valuable. Any ideas on grading classroom blogging?

One thing that I have been thinking a lot about is the conflict between treating classic literature as an artifact versus treating it as relevant material to understanding life.

I guess that I am having a hard time understanding why the two terms need to be mutually exclusive.  Certainly, there is a reason why these pieces of literature are so widely known, taught, and evaluated.  Certainly there is something within their volumes that says something a profound and meaningful way or no one would have ever heard about these books hundreds of years after they were written.  Why can’t something that was profound or controversial 200 years ago still be so?  Aren’t there relevant lessons to be learned in all great pieces of writing?

It is interesting that I was readin Appleman’s theories on this tension between the two ways of looking at literature this week.  A couple of days ago I was listening to a radio show that talked about a book that has just been written that talks about the importance of reading classic literature and releating to different stages of life.  The book, called The Things That Matter looks at seven pieces of classic British literature written fromthe 19th century and talks about valuable and practical lesson that can still be learned from classics today.  Has anyone read this book or heard about it?