I'm Buried in Books!
Please don't rescue me
For the past three days, I’ve been sitting on my porch couch with drinking great fake coffee in my great fake Stanley cup1, deep in a pile of books. Not novels. Not even poetry. Curriculum prep books.
This is one of my favorite moments in the teaching cycle: the time I spend in the summer immersing in curriculum planning and new teaching ideas. I do a lot of reading and curriculum prep every week during the year as well, but this summer prep isn’t on the same deadline. It’s more big picture, more dreamy and luxurious. It’s me, getting tired of the couch, taking some of my favorite essay books down to the lake to look for essays I might like to teach. It’s me turning down social invitations not because I feel the pressure of needing to finish this work, but because I’m nerding out too hard to want to break it off, even to see a friend at the farmer’s market or to make an epic trip to Golden Gardens beach.
And the picture of the year is coming into focus, and my mind is following threads and thinking about how it all might weave together, to mix my metaphorical media. Point is: it’s feeling good.
And I wanted to share some of the books I’ve been exploring with you all. Let me know if you have a favorite book on the subject too!
My 2024 Curriculum Prep Stack (so far)
The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom and the Community by Dave Morice
Poetry checkers? Poetry robots? Poetry chairs? Poetry that wraps around the block? Poetry blowing minds everywhere!
Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, and Social Justice in Classroom and Community by Georgia A Popoff and Quraysh Ali Lansana
Just dipping my toe in this one but really appreciating it so far.
Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments edited by Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett
I used this one a bunch last year too, finding some fun ideas
Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry edited by Matthew Burgess
Great book, especially for older grades. I use it for my Young Writers Workshop a lot.
These four books, along with some other favorites of mine, are put out by Teachers and Writers Collaborative. They have an extensive catalog of books about teaching writing, as well as an online magazine on the subject. I write for them sometimes, and in my experience they’re just great humans. There are more books in their list that I want to explore when I’ve finished digging into this stack.
Arting and Writing to Transform Education: An Integrated Approach to Culturally and Ecologically Responsive Pedagogy by Meleanna Aluli Meyer, Mikilani Hayes Maeshiro, and Anna Yoshio Sumida
This book is really cool and also weirdly dense, considering it’s full of amazing illustrations of student art and writing. It goes deep into ideas about education, and also has detailed lesson plans. Very cool to find people teaching with many of the same visions as me halfway across the ocean, and even cooler to learn more from their work, particularly about the power of culturally rooted education. I’m SO excited to try some of their lessons this year, and also to ruminate on their ideas. Glad to finally have some good time to spend with this book.
Student Voice: 100 Argument Essays by Teens on Issues That Matter to Them edited by Kathleen Schulten
This anthology put out by the New York Times Learning Network collects 100 short student essays on a wide range of topics. I’m planning to teach several of these essays in my teen essay class at Labyrinth Co-op and am excited to find such a wealth of great peer mentor texts! Thanks Sara for the recommendation!
Teach Living Poets by Lindsay Illich and Melissa Alter Smith
A book that came out of a hashtag (there’s also a website, which is a great resource) about, you guessed it, teaching the work of living poets. The focus of the book is more a public school ELA classroom, so many of the lessons are more analysis focused rather than being writing prompts themselves, but it’s a very cool project and I really appreciate the work Illich and Smith are doing. Teaching living poets is something I also feel passionate about, and something that makes poetry so much less dusty and marble-busty.
One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle
Like I mentioned, I get to teach essay writing this year, and plan on going through and beyond the ol’ five paragraph into some other kinds of essays. So I’ve been looking through my favorite essay collections, including this selected works by Portland’s own beloved Brian Doyle. This one is FULL of teachable essays, because they’re mostly short, funny, deep, quirky, and generally pretty clean. I will have to restrain myself from teaching like twenty of them. But I didn’t restrain myself from reading twenty of them. After all, it was a beautiful day at Seward Park.
Teacher appreciation present for the win!
You can really feel your passion for what you do.