psychology dector

I first shared This I Believe essays from National Public Radio (NPR) with my students a few months ago. We listened to pod casts of several essays, discussed their power and resonance, and then listened to a few more. I issued a set of guidelines and a rubric and off they went to create beautiful, heartfelt pieces that were a joy to read and comment upon. So what is so special about these essays, broadcast over the radio in the authors’ own voices? They are simple. They are emotional. They are profound. While listening, my students were mesmerized, and often gasped at a surprise turn, or a particularly powerful experience as related by the authors. Using them in my classroom changed the way we wrote, and made everything more immediate and present. The writing we listened to, and the writing we did ourselves, took on new meaning and incredible intensity. The history of the series is an interesting piece of writing itself. Here is this from the This I Believe website : “This I Believ

Today, my students participated in a journalism conference at the school. Titled, “The Future of Journalism In The Digital Age,” the conference featured a discussion with three local journalists, Paul Chaderjian, Allen Yekikian, and Liana Aghajanian. My senior student, Vatche Yousefian , moderated the festivities. Paul Chaderjian has a number of credits as a journalist in print, digital media, and television news. He has worked for ABC News , Asbarez News , The Armenian Reporter , Horizon Armenian TV , and most recently, Haytoug: The Official Publication of the Armenian Youth Federation Western United States . Allen Yekikian represented digital media, having worked as the Assistant Editor and Online Media Director at Asbarez News as well as Haytoug . He is a graduate of UCLA, and has degrees in history and Armenian Studies. Liana Aghajanian gave my students the print and digital news perspectives, having worked at The Glendale News-Press and Burbank Leader , both part of the Los

I know we have had some high profile movies and books that show a dedicated teacher who inspires her students (inner city kids make for good drama) to write meaningful prose. Usually, the teacher winds up resigning at the end of the movie because her methods were just too “out there,” because we all know that anyone who professes to love to teach teenagers to write, and write meaningfully, must be a little bit nuts. The fact of the matter is that teachers who can get kids not only to write, but to care about what they write enough to use a process and struggle to say something meaningful, are few and far between. In twenty-four years, I have not taught with many teachers who were dedicated to writing. Sure, I’ve worked with grammarians, literature buffs, amateur actors and screen writers, but a good, solid teacher of writing, who slogged through endless papers because her students wrote every week, who tried to publish student work, and was willing to read draft after draft after draft

Usually, around this time of year I am worrying about which books to teach next fall. I have written blog posts in the past detailing my reading lists for the coming year, and discussing the merits of this book or that book. This year is different. My obsession this year is the teaching of writing and grammar. We will be adopting writing and grammar textbooks for the high school English classes next year, and some literature will have to be cut from the syllabus to make room for this instruction. Although my students continue to be under-read, the teaching of writing skills and the structure of the language has become a dire necessity. SAT exams have grammar and writing sections, and I am discovering that students know less and less about the structure of English, and do not recognize even the terminology of grammar. If a student does not know what pronoun-antecedent agreement is, he cannot fix a sentence containing such an error. Recently, I embarked on a thorough examination of how w

Every day, it becomes more and more apparent that blogs are the future of publication. The middle man—the magazine, newspaper, or book publisher—is virtually eliminated. Blogs are people speaking to people. Yes, that brings with it some problems like editing and relevance, but I find that reading blogs is like sifting through sand for diamonds. I drop in, read for a while, and if the writing stays fresh and interesting, I hang around. If not, there is always the delete button. I have written in this space about William Michaelian , his poetry books , his Author’s Press Series , and his expansive website. His blog, Recently Banned Literature , offers daily doses of his poetry, ruminations, dreams, recent book acquisitions from local thrift shops, and other “marginalia.” William has amassed quite a following on the internet through blogging and Facebook, giving him a plethora of readers who often interact with his work within their own creations. He posts drawings, art work, and photog

The article in The New York Times caught my eye. I focused on a pair of sentences in the third paragraph: “Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation’s public-education debate.” The “Ms. Ravitch” to whom reporter Samuel G. Freedman refers is Diane Ravitch , and the book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System . It seems Ravitch, a proponent of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation , has made a u-turn in her thoughts about education and moved away from standardized testing as a determining factor for successful schools and teachers, and charter schools as a panacea for what ails our public institutions, and is now advocating quite a different approach to education in America. Freedman has discovered that Ravitch has a soft spot for the qua

This is the day I remember we grow older. I still think of you as children, but you are not, and never will be again. Young men and women, you are off to find your lives, and ride the train wherever it may take you. I will stay behind and keep the light on for others to follow. The letter lay open on my desk. “I’m not a big fan of having people in my life for years at end and then all of a sudden completely cutting them out of my life as if they never meant anything to me, so I found it appropriate to write…” This was a difficult year. Loss and loneliness. Change. The first year where the future was less than certain, and the truths fell to pieces. Everything, everything piled on, and many days, I did not think I would make it through, only to drive home in the gathering darkness and feel my own diminishing heart beat. I felt “time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” The dead of winter, empty trees, and nothing left to say. You were the first class that I ever lost my composure in front