Salome Milstead

In my 10th grade English classes we have covered a respectable distance.

Texts taught so far:

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
flash fiction pieces: Bullet, Traditional Style Indian Garage, In the Likelihood of Murder
Short stories: Eleven by Sandra Cisneros and The Jacket by Gary Soto

Skills practiced:

Talk to the text/annotation
Complex sentences
compare and contrast
tons and tons of writing - informal, creative, poetry
Inferences
CAHSEE evaluation (California High School Exit Exam)

Most importantly, I have gotten to know each student, read samples of their writing, and assessed their skill level (to one degree or another). I will use this info to craft the following 6 week grading period.

I believe the theme will be inferences: how do you know what you know.

I found someone musing on her blog, a friend of a friend whose blog I enjoy immensely.

She wrote:

There is a certain safety in just focusing on an established body of work, and being productive in a measurable way. sometimes process and exploratory work is not productive in the way that is easy to value- having a piece of artwork at the end of the day. Sometimes it just goes into the trash can, or sometimes nothing material comes of it at all.

I’ve been stuck in process and exploratory work ever since I left art school. I have never - except for the short, yet blissful, two years at SFAI - had an established body of work.

I’m having an ah-ha moment here. An established body of work. That’s exactly what sets successful working artists apart from someone spinning their wheels.

I ask, for myself, what might that look like? And this, my friends, appears to be precisely the problem.

Current book pile:
White Teeth
The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch

I’m trying to find a collection of books that I can use for book clubs in my English classes. These are some books I bought but haven’t read yet. Not sure if they’ll be appropriate or compelling.

I have torn through graphic novels Maus I & II and American Born Chinese, the books I’ll be teaching next. Also a series called Y: The Last Man not for my students but because it’s a great read.

Typical family email exchange

Dad wrote a short email apology for breaking netiquette:

…look at the link below and click it…..SNOPES is a site that picks up things like this, often called urban legends…in the future fact check BEFORE you forward to everyone.

to my contacts, Mia Culpa. Sorry!

Brother replied to all:

Dad, 6 yrs of Latin and several bumper stickers tell me that it’s actually “Mea Culpa.” I believe Mia Culpa is a Swedish porn star, but you should check Snopes to verify.

A parent just had to point out that in my Ethnic Lit class, I’d put Ethic Lit on the white board just below, “welcome to 10th grade English!”

whiteness as an ethnicity:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Summer reading pile:

For teaching American Ethnic Lit:

Maus by Spiegelman
Never Drank the Kool Aid by Taure
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Third and Indiana by Steve Lopez
Woman Hollering Creek by Cisneros
several educational anthologies: Coming of Age in America, The Language of Literature, Tapestry, the InterActive Reader
a few “how to be a good teacher” tomes: Designing Groupwork and Dreamkeepers

For my own reading pleasure:
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez

I still haven’t signed a contract, so I’m starting with the books that are solely for my pleasure. After I’m sure I’ll be teaching in the Fall, I’ll start in on the others.

I’m working on compiling suggestions for curriculum. This is someone else’s list. I will be teaching Ethnic Lit to 10th grade next year. I’m open to suggestions. I don’t know a lot of this genre - too bad I got bumped from teaching European Lit. I guess it’s always good to be stretched from the comfort zone.

Thank you to: http://solipsismsaves.livejournal.com/

A Constantly Updated and Edited List [Mar. 31st, 2008|09:05 pm]
of poems, short stories, essays and novels for the English curriculum I am writing:

Jorge Luis Borges:: Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius and Funes, His Memory
Ray Bradbury:: The Fog Horn (thx Davi!)*
Harold Brodkey:: First Love and Other Sorrows
Ian Buruma:: The Freedom to Offend
Albert Camus:: Selections from The Myth of Sisyphus
Raymond Carver:: Cathedral (thx Calder)
Julio Cortazar:: Axolotl* and Letter to a Young Lady in Paris
Don Delillo:: White Noise
H.D.:: Heat
Fyodor Dostoevsky:: Notes From Underground
Annie Dillard:: Total Eclipse*
Dave Eggers:: Theo*
Gretel Ehrlich:: The Solace of Open Spaces
T.S. Eliot:: The Waste Land
Jeffrey Eugenides:: The Virgin Suicides (short story version)
William Faulkner:: A Rose For Emily*
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Nathaniel Hawthorne:: Wakefield
Henrik Ibsen:: A Doll’s House
Denis Johnson:: Car Crash While Hitchhiking
James Joyce:: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Heidi Julavitz:: Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz*
Miranda July:: The Swim Team* and This Person*
A.L. Kennedy:: Frank*
Edouard Leve:: Autoportrait
Kelly Link:: The Faery Handbag and Stone Animals
Louis Menand:: Name That Tone
Steven Millhauser:: The Next Thing
Daniel Orozco:: Shakers*
Fernandoa Pessoa:: Selections from The Book of Disquiet
Sylvia Plath: Mirror, Mushrooms, and Elm*
Edgar Allen Poe:: William Wilson* and Man of the Crowd
Michael Pollan:: Why Bother? and Power Steer
Karen Russell:: Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
William Shakespeare:: As You Like It, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra
Richard Siken:: Scheherazade and Seaside Improvisation
Peter Singer:: Famine, Affluence, and Morality and What Should a Billionaire Give–and What Should You?
John Kennedy Toole:: A Confederacy of Dunces*
Walter Van Tilburg Clark:: Hook*
Virginia Woolf:: Kew Gardens*
Wiliam Butler Yeats:: The Second Coming

*ones I have taught

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