These are just a few fairly random pieces of media that I’ve come across lately that open some paths to start talking about the power of words and the struggle to define them. I haven’t made up my mind about this podcast as a whole yet but this one was interesting. The whole idea of […]
Word Games/English in the Wild I made a blog focused on the idea of English in the wild. The goal is to look at language and how it works outside of school, to capture the things people find interesting, odd, or broken about English as they interact with it. Essentially, I keep finding things that […]
Like six degrees of separation or six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the goal of this game is to link six separate works through their literary allusions. The key element here would be to get students playing early on and reading/watching/viewing/listening to lots of things with this lens turned on. This may even be a decent […]
This project was inspired by a Sklar brothers bit that I heard on the VA Beach AM comedy channel the other day. An edited and condensed version of track 16 is here. Now on to the assignment . . . Take any video.1 Add your voice over as if you were a local TV news […]
This is the first #ds106 assignment I’ve done in a long while. The challenge is to write a poem using only the titles of Twilight Zone episodes. It’s an easy one for any English teacher to use as is or to adapt to whatever restricted set they want – chapter titles from a book, band […]
I read Maus I and II and opted to make a timeline. Maus is a graphic novel completed in 1991 by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book uses postmodern techniques—most strikingly in its depiction of races of humans as […]
Beaver Hats Here are examples of hats made of felted beaver fur, because if you ask your students to draw a picture of a beaver hat, you’re likely to get some sort of coonskin monstrosity. (Seriously, you should try that.) Pukestocking, Puke-stocking, Puke Stocking tl;dr – Being called puke-stocking likely has everything to do with […]
Statistics Reducing a player’s worth to a single number can be contemptible, says John Thorn, a seminal sabermetric writer and the author of the 1984 book The Hidden Game of Baseball. That book introduced the Linear Weights System, which attaches a value in runs to every offensive event. (For instance, a single when the book […]
Same as it ever was The Massachusetts Body of Liberties 1620 More proof Pilgrams were more interesting than your history book would admit with a hat tip to my own dad for sending the link. No torture . . . unless you’re convicted and we feel like you’re holding something back but we promise not […]
This was made with Timeline JS and is predominantly dates from the Virginia Standards of Learning USI5 and USI6 but I’m sure this is pretty standard fare for any US history course. I’ve got a fair amount more work to do but things are at least sketched out based on the “required knowledge.” My goal […]