A group for educators who want to return to teaching students, kindergarten through graduate school, to think instead of just teaching facts, skills, concepts, and habits.

Students can't adapt what they learn because they are not taught to think. This prevents them from applying what they know in an unfamiliar context.

We need to teach students to think.

If you agree, why not join?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60092970334

I've started a poetry unit at school with my students.  Today we read and explicated some Walt Whitman, some Edna St. Vincent Millay, some Robert Herrick, some James Hetfield, and some David Gilmour.  :-)

Many of the kids had never even heard "Comfortably Numb" before.  Some really do think Flock of Seagulls is classic stuff.  haha.  Still, it's great fun watching them produce poetry and take a risk, reading in front of their peers. 

I really enjoy teaching poetry.  Currently, it's a unit within a larger semester course, but next school year we will run a new course, titled (creatively, haha) "Poetry" and from what I hear the sign-ups have been good.  I'm really looking forward to teaching it.  Watching kids develop and improve, and watching some of them become fledgling poets.

Many students often ask me these days why they need to learn meter and rhyme, since they've been told since kindergarten that freeverse is just as much poetry as anything else.  I agree that it is, but I think that a poet should choose to use freeverse as one option, not choose freeverse because it is the only thing they know how to do.

I know that sounds pretentious of me, but the same goes with other creative endeavors, in my opinion.  If you want to paint very abstract stuff that's fine, but I hesitate to refer to someone as an artist if they are incapable of painting within the context of something with more parameters; realism, impressionism, etc etc ad infinitem.  

I have a hard time with the idea I guess that everyone is born a poet, or an artist, or a novelist, or a performer and that the intense labor, practice, and learning that used to go into become great and truly admirable no longer applies.  

I'm old fashioned in this way...creative expression is not always artistically noteworthy.  I know that's not politically correct in some circles, but I hope honesty still is.

K

Sometimes I wonder how I went from the high-tech corporate world back to teaching and also to writing.

Often people ask me about my background so I've decided to include a concise CV.  If this is way more than you wanted, I apologize up front...

K

***CV REMOVED***

Okay, I want to hear from folks...
My birthday is July 26, 1968.  As old as some of you are now thinking I am, I'm even older than that.  It's not the year you were made, but the mileage that matters, and I have a ton of mileage on me.  I'm old, fat, and broken.  Other than that, I'm fine though.  :-)

I don't know if it is a function of getting older and becoming more fixated with my b-day, but I've come to notice who was born on the same day as I was.  I'll share some of those born on the same day as I was, and you comment with some of yours, ok?

Here we go... July 26ers I find noteworthy...

Alfred Marshall
George Bernard Shaw
Carl Jung
Andre Maurois
Aldous Huxley
Blake Edwards
Stanley Kubrick
Mick Jagger
Helen Mirren
Rick Bragg (I'll be presenting something written by Rick at one of my workshops at Stonehouse)
Kevin Spacey
Sandra Bullock
Jeremy Piven
Olivia Williams (same day and year haha)
Kate Beckinsale (man, is she beautiful, and wicked smaht)
Gael Clichy (so, yah, I love soccer)

I really dig this mix of people.
I hope you'll share some of your lists...

I can see some of me in a lot of these people...  cynic, need for attention, survivor of stuff I'd have rather done without, a need to create, a need to spin tales, a sense of always falling a bit short of what I was trying to do, trying harder next time, having a sense of humor about the whole thing...

I see stuff here that I wish I had, but that list would sound maudlin and self-piteous (is that a word?  even hyph?)  Anyway, the list is for fun, so have fun and share.  

PS-The first person who writes, "Hey!  You'll be 40 this year!" gets blocked or whatever...haha

I've started reading an advance copy of a debut novel by Andrew Davidson titled "The Gargoyle"

It will be hitting bookstore shelves in August 2008 I believe.

I'm not far along, but I'm hooked. I'm really enjoying Davidson's narrative style and story. I think the book is going to do well and will be one of those "everyone is talking about it" titles.

Here's what Sara Gruen said about it: “I was blown away by Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. It reminded me of Life of Pi, with its unanswered (and unanswerable) contradictions. A hypnotic, horrifying, astonishing novel that manages, against all odds, to be redemptive."

Here's a product description from the publisher (I think):
"The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished."

Anyway...from what I've read so far...I recommend it.