Comment

Comment by Barry Lane on May 12, 2010 at 12:05pm

I love the opening of that book!

Comment by Jennifer Mueller on May 12, 2010 at 11:17am

I am finishing James Joyce's A Portriate of the Artist as a Young Man. I soared through the first half and now find the last 50 pages tedious. Of course bedtime may not be the right time to read James Joyce.

Comment by Barry Lane on April 25, 2010 at 4:40pm

I should have clarified. I meant when they write memoir. Perhaps it's just confidence and authority I am talking about. They are supremely confident.

Comment by chris on April 25, 2010 at 9:09am

Hemingway was full of experience. World War 1, Spanish Civil War......

Comment by Barry Lane on April 25, 2010 at 6:06am

I like how Hemingway leaves stuff out. He is like a guy who speaks with pregnant pauses, waiting for the reader to fill in. What I find remarkable about Hemingway and Steinbeck is how full of themselves they are. They mistake their ego for truth.

Comment by chris on April 24, 2010 at 2:35pm

Iam rereading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I have always liked his writing style, not necessarily content but mostly structure. I have no interest in what Hemingway did in Paris, just how he wrote about it.

Comment by Brenda Krupp on April 5, 2010 at 7:29pm

Just finished "The Dome" by Stephen King (all 1065 pages). He always leaves me thinking about the deeper message in his books. This one spoke to me about compassion, bullying, how a little bit of power can go awry. Great read!

Comment by Miles Bodimeade on January 9, 2010 at 9:41am

Education is a wonderful thing and one of the great things about it is it expands and improves over generations. Take my 14-year-old daughter: she is wayyy cleverer than me thanks to excellent teachers and her mother's genes. She taught me a very good lesson the other day that I had no idea about - that I learn kinesthetically. I guess most teachers know about that theory but 40 years ago I'd just get a slap on the head for twitching my foot or tapping my pencil.
Quite right too.
But the best way for me to understand poetry is to copy it by hand and my daughter explained it's because I learn kinesthetically.
Anyhow, as well as learning kinesthetically I'm a very slow reader so I'm still on "Birthday Letters" that I recommended before Christmas. One of the later poems "The Rabbit Catcher" bears witness to Sylvia having what I take to be some sort of psychotic episode and explains the helplessness one feels when a friend or someone you care for becomes delusional.
Chances are some of your pupils have had to cope with this. Having Ted Hughes on their side but equally at sea may be helpful for them. And for them to know that writing about things that scare us can sometimes help us understand them.
Another wonderful thing about these poems is that most of them have an ending or satisfying climax or conclusion so they read and stay with you like ultra-vivid short stories.
Okay, I'll stop rattling on about them now and read something else for a change.
Kinesthetically.
Happy New Year to you all and good reading

Comment by Amber White on December 29, 2009 at 2:58am

Tonight I finished reading Steven Layne’s first professional book, Igniting a Passion for Reading. This book shares ideas on how we can get our students to value books…timely indeed. With all this Race to the Top business and demand for more teacher accountability (fueling the assessment monster in my opinion), the affective domain has been somewhat abandoned or deemed unimportant by many of those pushing current educational reform.

Layne makes a brilliant case on the importance of addressing the affective component and how devastating it will be if we don’t. He takes a hard look at aliteracy-the growing number of students who can read but choose not to- and what we can do about it. I love the simplicity of the strategies and ideas presented, but more importantly, how this professional work embodies what we know: teachers need to remain at the center during this fast paced era of change.

I love Layne's candor and wit along the way. At the end of each chapter, I enjoyed reading his personal in-the-trenches lessons, as well as the interesting excerpts and thoughts he included from notable writers/readers/thinkers.

Refreshing.

Comment by Roland Goodbody on December 8, 2009 at 6:25pm

Hey Miles -

Poetry often makes me buy another round, too.

Seriously, though, I've got a copy of Birthday Letters at my mum's in Rowlands Castle and always dip into it when I'm back home. It was quite a find at a charity shop a few years back. The chronicle of their relationship from her first arriving at Cambridge makes for fascinating reading.

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