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Posted by Unknown on January 20, 2016

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Why I haven't posted today...

Thanks @therealbanksy

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Re-viewing Moby Dick: Melville as America's Shakespeare

I'm reposting this from my personal blog. It's a post I wrote about teaching Moby Dick back in 2009. That should give you an idea of how long I've been trying to perfect this unit--JD
Eighteen months ago my principal and English department head conspired to do something that would shake my teaching to the core: for the first time in 12 years of teaching, they assigned me to teach 11th-grade American Literature.

It seems strange that it took me 12 years to get to this point. I had always considered myself a "Brit Lit" kind of guy, having studied for a year in England, and I enjoyed the basic essay-writing skills taught in 9th and 10th grade. I really didn't care to teach American Lit—until I had to care.

What was I to do? I took on the task with gusto. Soon my love for American history and my passion for my country was pouring out. I was reading great American books for the first time like The Great Gatsby, Walden, and Moby Dick (What took me so long? The educati…

Huck Finn: Essay Questions, first eight chapters

In these first eight chapters of Huckleberry Finn, I see connections with the literature that we read (covering American literature from pre-1492 to the writing of the Constitution in 1787-88).
I see a lot of Thomas Jefferson in Tom Sawyer, the way he set up a gang of robbers and tried to govern them.I think Jim, with his superstition and his witchcraft, would have been quite infamous in Salem.I think the Widow Douglass and Jonathan Edwards had a hell of a lot in commonI read about Pap and Huck's struggles to be free of his drunkenness, and I can almost see King George III, fighting to keep the American colonies under his thumb.I try to see similarities between these events and me. I connect with the stories and the characters.How do you connect with Huckleberry Finn? What are some stories from the reading that you identified with? Leave your answer as a comment below.
To receive credit, agree or disagree with one of the connections I mention above in an essay of 100 words. You …

The Quest for the Perfect...

French FryToday's New York Times had a story that inspired me more than most. It's about the quest for a specific kind of french fry: one that stays crisp for 30 minutes, long enough to survive delivery from a fast food restaurant to a customer.

The focus of the article isn't McDonald's or KFC, although those are two of the biggest sellers of fries in the world. Instead, the article is about Lamb Weston, the company that raises and processes the potatoes that go into the fries.

The attention to detail is amazing. The "Pentagon of Potatoes," is a thing, apparently, where the crops on Lamb Weston's 20,000-acre farm in southern Washington State. Staffers at the, uh, Pentagon "[test the crops] every week to measure their nutrients, a sort of blood test for plants. Using those results, workers can adjust how much water they give the crops," writes the Times' Rachel Abrams.

Why all the monitoring?

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James A Dittes

If You Must Know...

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