Pearls & Onions

Your second task in the summer assignment–one you need to begin immediately–is to select three RSS feeds, add them to your Reader, and begin reading–regularly.
At the core of the AP English Language class is argumentation. To understand the qualities that make a strong argument and the strategies writers use, we must immerse ourselves in reading arguments. [...]

Today, I stumbled upon (literally–not the digital tool) an awesome slideshow–one that explains the power of Web 2.0 tools. Check it out:

| View | Upload your own

 
Pretty awesome, huh, that this IBM employee is encouraging co-workers to read, write, and react. Sounds like typical English class behavior, which is exactly why blogging–when done right–can [...]

This quarter we’re reading one of my all-time favorites, The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The book fits nicely in our gender thematic study. Though it is literature–classical fiction–rather than nonfiction, try to read with your rhetorical eyes, thinking of the text as an argument.
If you were to sit down with Chopin, what claims might [...]

In the spirit of becoming better bloggers, take a few minutes to read two these two articles:
Karl Fisch, a noted edublogger, defines blogging and give example
Kris Braden’s blog post–How to Prevent Another Leonardo DaVinci–award Best Student Blog Post 2007 (I think that was the title.)
Give me feedback via Comments. What do you think? Do [...]

Someone once said writing is the inking of our thinking. Before we can write profound analyses of text, we need to mull over the text, reading and re-reading it deeply, thinking and discussing the text, bouncing our ideas off other critical readers of the same text. Good discussions help us all polish–or sometimes discover–our ideas. [...]

Six days. Five-hundred forty minutes. Thirty-two thousand four hundred seconds. We must make those 32,400 seconds between now and Christmas break count–every single one of them. To that end, I’ve decided to combine our brain power, creative energies, and critical thinking skills to create tutorial videos to review the key skills we’ve learned this semester [...]

This Thanksgiving, I hope you’ll spend some time hunting for more than just turkey and dressing. As we continue our journey to give voice to the techniques writers use to “play” with language, we’re starting to appreciate how challenging acquiring a rhetorical vocabulary can be. It can seem a bit daunting–especially when multiple terms exist [...]

Many of you are becoming expert bloggers: writing interesting, thought-provoking posts, including links to relevant sites, embedding pictures or videos relating to your posts, incorporating original graphics that enhance the look and readability of your site, eliciting comments from peers and unknowns. As we continue to hone our blogging skills, we need to consider our [...]

Part of your daily ritual should now be sitting down to your computer, signing in to iGoogle, skimming through your Google Reader widget, checking out what new content your peers and your teacher have added to their blogs. Some of us have encountered a problem, however, in being able to subscribe to both POSTS and [...]

Have you noticed how long posts clutter your blog pages, making them not-so-pretty to look at and not-so-easy to navigate? Your reader has to scroll, and scroll, and scroll to view all your posts.
To solve this problem, many authors create teasers.