Sometimes all it takes is a few lines of writing to change the way you think of a familiar word. The quotes below use well-word vocabulary words with such original definitions, contexts, or explanations that you may never see the words in quite the same way again. Will you jealously wish you had written the lines below? Probably. With that in mind, there’s a prompt at the bottom of this post to help inspire your own word-redefining writing.
(more…)
The title of a writing workshop I recently taught was Microscope Vs. Telescope. As a writer or reader, you can think of description as a lens focused on a topic. And the topic – who or what the story is about – is usually obvious. A masterful writer, though, makes us think not only about what the lens is focusing on, but the character on the other side of that lens. What can we tell about the character whose perspective we’re following? In what direction does this character choose to point the microscope? What details does this person notice? And what can we learn about the character from the way the way he or she focuses on those details?
(more…)
I’ve always been interested in the dreams so many teachers seem to have at the end of a school vacation—so much so that I’ve written this post interpreting “The Bathrobe Dream” and Other Common Teacher Nightmares.
Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that there’s a passage that describes these dreams in Adequate Yearly Progress, It’s at the end of a chapter that takes place over winter break, The Cross-Disciplinary Compare-and-Contrast Holiday Review Packet.
(more…)
Even though Adequate Yearly Progress is a novel, it owes a big debt to work by journalists and memoirists—so much so that there’s a list of non-fiction books listed in the acknowledgments. You’ll find the complete list below. Some of these books are specifically education-related, some focus on other issues touched on in the novel. All the books listed below are well-written, informative, and worth a read if you’re interested in the topics they cover.
(more…)
The second chapter of Adequate Yearly Progress: A Novel takes place at a back-to-school faculty meeting. You can read the full chapter for free here.
(Extra credit if you’ve been to a recent faculty meeting where some of these things happened.)
(more…)