my life to live

Vote for Media Features

Here at WordPress.com, we always run the most recent version of the WordPress open source software. In addition, we do custom development so that we can offer features not included in the open…

M.I.A.

I have been a busy girl the past few weeks…wrapping up the school year, writing some unit plans for summer school, moving into TFA’s Philadelphia Institute to support some first-year teachers, moving into a new place, finalizing a blog post for the Notebook, still trying to maintain some semblance of a social life…

Today is a beautiful day. Can’t spend it inside!

June Wrap-Up

Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn…

National Blog Posting Month

Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month — some with…

Where were you when you heard about MJ?

I was walking into the dorm at 1300, and Sarge the security guard pushed a newspaper in front of our faces. So I actually heard about it from an honest-to-god real newspaper. How quaint!

Why I don't like poetry

I can’t write it.

katiebakes:

Good old US of A.

School lunches from around the world. (via)

To qualify as a Title I school, you need to have a certain amount of students coming from low-income households; frequently, this overlaps with the amount of students who financially qualify for free lunch. Sounds great, right? Well, when your lunch looks like this photo above, why wouldn’t you just spend the two dollars your mom or grandmom gave you that morning on 4 bags of chips, a can of soda, and some M&Ms from the corner store? (Corner store prices cannot be beat.) Honestly, you’d probably get just as much nutritional value, and it would taste better.

Free lunches such as this one are an insult to families and children who know they deserve better. In fact, for many of these students, school-provided breakfasts and lunches are the only meals they will get all day. Mental ability is directly affected by what you’ve eaten—or not eaten—and the disparity in diets between a student from North Philly and a student from Gladwyne, PA is just one of the tiny things that outsiders don’t know about when they make sweeping generalizations about what kind of attitudes our students have toward school, and how it’s affecting their progress.

My network of schools, ever willing to be progressive and caring about our students’ progress, will be participating in this program next year. Check it out!

Just received the list of most frequently banned books in American schools that one could get fired for using. Oops. Taught #26 and #17 this year.

wherescoachbombay:

Impressions Edited by Jack Booth et al.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

The Witches by Roald Dahl

Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite

Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell

Blubber by Judy Blume

Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl

Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam

A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck

Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman

Christine by Stephen King

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Fallen Angels by Walter Myers

The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman

Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder

Night Chills by Dean Koontz

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks

The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder

My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Cujo by Stephen King

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson

The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs

On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

Grendel by John Champlin Gardner

I Have to Go by Robert Munsch

Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Pigman by Paul Zindel

My House by Nikki Giovanni

Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz

I bolded the books that have been assigned as reading at my current school, or were part of the curriculum, or are available in classroom libraries. There could be more bolded on this list; this is just what I know of.

Did I mention that my seventh graders outperformed the state of Pennsylvania on math and closed the achievement gap in reading?

Banned books are bullshit. If any book should be banned, it should be the crap I confiscated repeatedly this year: I’m a Hustla’s Wife; Hood Rat; Rectangle of Lust; etc.

ckck:

Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

(Can you tell yet I love these kind of shots?)

ckck is a blogger who has been partaking in a dream of mine for the past few months: road tripping across the U.S. The photos are spectacular!

South Dakota is the kind of place I would love to visit, despite the strange looks I get from people when I tell them that. I think I have a tendency to exoticize and fetishize “Americana” the way others might exoticize or fetishize me and my ethnicity.

“ I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children…

—

An Iranian blogger (via Andrew Sullivan, kylebingman) (via squashed)

They’re right, you know. It’s not about us. It’s about all of us. We live in a global community now, as proven by the very nature of the Revolution’s chosen medium.

As a teacher, and a former history teacher, my thoughts are always with the younger generations: how they will view the events occurring around them, and what they will choose to take from them. If just one young American surveys his or her life, and then realizes, “These things that I take for granted are considered a privilege worth dying for halfway around the world; perhaps I should not take certain things so seriously!”—well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?