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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…
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!
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…
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…
Good old US of A.
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!
- 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.
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?