I had a great visit locally this past week, to E.O. Smith High School, to observe one of the graduate interns I supervise in his placement with Denise Abercrombie. Eric, the student, can’t praise Denise enough. Not that that surprises any of us who know her. Together they are doing a unit that incorporates The Crucible, poetry, and bullying. In the lesson I saw, students were learning how to write persona poems, from the point of view of characters from Miller’s play, with a particular focus on bullying. Denise also showed me a hallway display that ties into a different student’s senior project that invites students to create these mixed media poems that are then posted in the hallway. Just amazing stuff.
I also got to meet with my department’s Director of Graduate Studies, Veronica Makowsky, to pitch the core component of a Fellowship I just received from a Neag School of Education jadwal called Teachers for a New Era. TNE’s mission is to promote greater content area knowledge in teachers, and they are the ones who spearheaded the usulan for a dual degree jadwal between the School of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Anyway, my basic idea is to create and promote a terminal Master’s degree in English for high school English teachers (others could do it too, so long as they have an undergraduate degree in English) as their second MA. It would not involve a Graduate Assistantship to teach Freshman English, because presumably the students would already have their own classes to teach. It would involve evening classes, take about four years to complete at one class a semester, and require one Summer Institute with the Connecticut Writing Project. Among other things, those completing the degree would then be encouraged to become Early College Experience teachers who would then teach Freshman English as a high school ECE course for UConn credit. The education professors loved the idea when I proposed it as part of my Fellowship application, and my department head liked the idea when we had to secure his approval as the simpulan piece of the application process. But now I had to garner the favor of the person who would be most directly affected by it—and to my great joy she loved the idea. Now I have to get the formal usulan written by the end of the month!
Later in the week I had another cool opportunity to meet with the Director of Secondary Education for Hartford Public Schools to propose an idea hatched by outgoing Creative Writing Program Director Penelope Pelizzon and me to expand the Creative Writing Program’s Wallace Stevens program. The jadwal is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, and though it has always had a high school component, this has never involved more than a small contest for a few students at a couple of participating Hartford schools, and a poetry reading from the current Wallace Stevens poet. Penelope and I proposed developing an elective high school course, for ECE credit, with a university counterpart for undergraduates, in which the focus of the curriculum is the collected works of the fifty Wallace Stevens poets honored during the long history of the program. This basically involves an overview of the most honored poets of the late twentieth century, from Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney, and Louise Glück, to name just a few. Among them are two Nobel Prize winners, twenty Pulitzer Prize winners, and a whole bunch of US Poet Laureates. The director, Kevin McCaskill, loved the idea, and now we have a follow up meeting with a half dozen building principals and the Director of Language Arts for the city. Very cool.
It’s exciting to work with interns, classroom teachers, professors, university jadwal directors, and administrators from both the university and the public schools who are excited, have vision, and work efficiently to get things done that will benefit the students. All in all, it was a good week.
Comments
Post a Comment