When I first took over teaching my Honors 10 English class, the curriculum included Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. That’s an excellent play, but when I saw that many of those students had read Romeo and Juliet the year before, and that the only other Shakespeare plays in our curriculum were Macbeth in Brit. Lit. and Hamlet […]
Category: writer
The Importance of Connotation
Words only hold meaning in context. Speak any word in a place where no one else understands that language and it holds no meaning. That is true for the denotation (a word’s literal or most common meaning) as well as for connotation (whatever else it signifies along with its denotation). English is such a rich […]
Why Sometimes a Character Must Die
Death is waiting for everyone. Each one of us will some day experience dying, whether after aging, through sickness, or suddenly. There is an inescapable inevitability to death and many choose to live their lives ignoring the end as much as they can, as though it will somehow prolong life if they succeed. I recently […]
We Should All Read Books From Other Countries
My reading used to be very limited, mostly by what I could find in my school library. That and my devotion to my preferred genres. Once I began teaching and as I became more aware of the world around me, I’ve realized that I not only need to read more broadly, but that I enjoy […]
Dear Class of 2020
Dear Class of 2020, I’d like to tell you a little story: There was once a bottle, freshly made of glistening glass, waiting. This bottle had high hopes for its future, wondering what would fill it, where it would be sent, and who would open it. The bottle had watched all those before it filled […]
All English Teachers Should Write
I’ve been writing stories since middle school. They weren’t any good (and some of mine now still aren’t) but I was writing. I didn’t start caring about the craft of writing until I had stories of my own I needed to tell. My drive to master the mechanics, conventions, and forms of writing came when […]
I Am a Cat
I recently finished reading Soseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat, and shortly after I finished, Findus handed me the below reflections and insisted I publish them for him. So here you go. I am a Cat. The name they’ve given me is Findus. It’s as good a name as any, I guess; occasionally, I’ll even […]
Man of Steel
I have an uneasy relationship with superhero movies. As a lover of SF and fantasy, I appreciate the transcendent and speculative nature of the stories and characters. As someone that enjoys mindless action movies to unwind, the power and motion of the action-sequences are often mesmerizing. But as a teacher of literature, I’m also at […]
The Blight of the Morning Grump
It has come to my attention that there are people who behave abnormally and in a totally unacceptable manner when they awake in the mornings. As any rational and well-behaved human should know, the morning is for being chipper, awake, breakfasting, and socializing. Unfortunately, we are faced with a blight upon the earth—those that are […]
Are We Using the Same Language?
Complex storytelling and how the masters use language differently One of my favorite moments is opening a new novel and experiencing the confusion of reading the first chapter. It’s not a bad confusion in which I’m lost or unable to parse the language. No, it’s like being plunked into new surroundings and having to get […]