Today at Arizona English Teacher’s Association Frank Beddor, the author of The Looking Glass Wars, and PJ Haarsma, the author of The Softwire Series, are discussing their books in a keynote entitled “Something funny happened on the way to becoming an author”. The two men have been friends from before they became authors and told [...]

Posted in Uncategorized

I’ve been teaching Into the Wild, the journey of Christopher McCandless, since early in 2005 so when Changing Hands Bookstore announced that they were bringing Jon Krakauer to town I was stoked. Into the Wild seems to touch more of my students than any other required novel. Last month Krakauer released his next nonfiction novel- [...]

Posted in AP Lang, books, presentations

Posted in comic, jokes, literature

In spring of 2006 while I was at a conference in Baltimore, MD my colleague wanted to go out to dinner with her daughter who’d been living in the area at the time. She invited us to go along, and the conversation was amicable. Eventually it circled around to our reason for being there (Education [...]

Posted in literature

The AP English course is completing an Independent Reading Project for quarter 4 based on a select number of non-fiction titles, on of which is Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone. The other day a former student sent me an article from an Australian newspaper entitled “Beah’s credibility a long way gone” about the anachronistic [...]

Posted in irp, literature

Tonight I was sitting with my daughter and wife and across came the 400+ Twitter text of the day. This one was from @soul4real, and I’d been tagged. I wasn’t sure what it wanted me to do, and I was use to the list of four things this or that, but this one wanted me [...]

Posted in literature