Here’s something terrific for free: It’s an E-book of great articles from the always useful Educating Modern Learners, an online source with which I am proud to be associated. I’m still working my way through the content – and in some cases re-reading – but no disappointments. These people write well about important and useful topics. See the list below.…
Category: Poetry
A Darkling Year or Joy Illimited.
BBC’s Radio 4 first tweet for 2014 was a thrush with a bright blue sky background and a quotation from The Darkling Thrush – a poem that Thomas Hardy dated December 31st, 1900. It’s all rather grim and gloomy. The poem records the desolation of winter, the dregs of the day and the end of the century. This is no…
The Edge: A sudden unplanned flight of fancy
Come to the Edge We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew. Christopher Logue “Come to the Edge” frequently misattributed to Guillaume Apollinaire Sail in a new direction Simply by sailing in a new direction You could enlarge the world Allen Curnow ‘Landfall in…
Darkness and Light
What 60 schools can tell us about teaching 21st century skills. Here’s the TEDx Denver version of the talk Grant Lichtman gave at #naisac13 in Philadelphia. I take my title from an extraordinary compliment that Grant paid Poughkeepsie Day School on his blog where he wrote: “…Poughkeepsie Day School, a school that has preserved the fires of the Progressive Era, un-extinguished, for decades,…
My First and Last Poppy: Evermore and Nevermore
In Memory of Lance Corporal Frank Herbert Sims. Royal Army Medical Corps who died on 28 January 1919 Age 34 Son of Albert John and Rosa Sims, of Streatham, London; husband of Frances Sims, of 115, Strathyre Avenue, Norbury, London. Father of Edith and Kathleen. With the a brief two hour exception last Friday, I have never worn a poppy. This…
“Knowledge not purchased by the loss of power!”
Children: How will they ever know who they are? The question is the last line of “The Things we Steal from Children” by Dr. John Edwards. You can read the whole below. I found it via Leading and Learning – a blog and website from New Zealand that I have long found valuable. In a different time and context William …
The Possible’s Slow Fuse
Wisdom and inspiration from Emily Dickinson: The gleam of an heroic Act Such strange illumination The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination
Show an Affirming Flame: It’s Not The Real World and That’s a Good Thing
On the last day of the year, time to show an affirming flame as another low dishonest decade ends. I’ll leave all the best and worst and top ten lists to others, but merely remark – that for all the base mendacity in the real world, life in school remains a place of joy and possibility. The words and phrases…
Praising the Beast
We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, so terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously, “I think I shall praise it.” Robert Haas. Epigraph to his second book of poems, Praise: 1979 If you work in a school you get two chances at a new year. …
Why give homework?
Every year at the annual Eagle Society poetry reading a lower school student demonstrates that s/he has spent homework time memorizing Shel Silversteins’s twelve line epic that begins: Homework, oh homework I hate you, you stink. I wish I could wash you away in the sink. If only a bomb would explode you to bits, Homework oh homework you’re giving…
Stephen Colbert hears the Mermaids
What’s the difference between a metaphor and lying? With a president who reads Derek Walcott and quotes June Jordan it’s good to have comedians at home with T.S.Eliot. This week inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander explained metaphor to Stephen on The Colbert Report. Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows Meanwhile at PDS English teachers had a quick email conversation that…
“Stony the road we trod” The inauguration of President Barak Obama
PDS marked the inauguration at its Peacemakers Assembly on Tuesday. Entitled “Stony the road we trod” the event began with the singing of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing. In the collage you can see pictures of the participants from high school to lower school. Ater lunch everyone returned to the JEJ theater to watch the inauguration.
In the microscope
PDS has new science laboratories. Time for a poem from the Czech poet-scientist Miroslav Holub. In the Microscope Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear the murmuring, the revolt…
“Suddenly there’s Poughkeepsie”
Suddenly there’s Poughkeepsie what a hard time the Hudson River has had trying to get to the sea it seemed easy enough to rise out of Tear of the Cloud and tumble and jumps draining a swamp here and and other smaller longings for the wide except for its spelling ocean sixty miles away is that town every day and…
Thanksgiving Time
When the night winds whistle through the trees and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down, When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round, When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground, It’s Thanksgiving Time! – from Thanksgiving Time by Langston Hughes I hope your holiday is wonderful.