"Do you have any specific suggestions for improvement for Elena? Anything that would help you learn more in class?"
“I think that she has to feel a little bit more confident.”
As I pressed the button on the door of the green fence and waited to be buzzed into my new secondary school, I felt close to losing both my resolve and my breakfast.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” I say to Alma, one of the pre-K students at my school. Alma narrows her eyes and gives me a look that says Go to hell. She is holding a sharpened pencil, readying it to poke another student. “I'm watching you. Put it away.” I see my former student, Claudia, running from the sidewalk into the street. Why aren't the teachers stopping her? I look around for the music teacher who usually monitors…
Carla Bruce's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Like many English majors during their college years, I scoffed with disdain when met with the all-too familiar, well-meaning query: Do you plan to teach?
And like many English majors post-graduation, I ended up becoming a teacher.
My feelings about my profession toss and turn as wildly as the tiny human in my uterus. How
I've loved Alexander Chee's writing for some time, from the powerful essays that served as my introduction to his work to his debut novel, Edinburgh. Chee won a Whiting Award for Edinburgh, and is a recipient of the NEA fellowship in fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and on NPR. The Toast asked Alexander to talk with us about writing, teaching, changes…
There are few things a biracial 16-year-old growing up in Southern California has in common with Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. There are even fewer experiences in the life of that 16-year-old that have much if anything to do with the events that unfold in that novel. So it’s unsurprising that I have never liked The Scarlet Letter. Like many people who grew up in the American school system, I first read Hawthorne’s…
During a recent visit to the Frick Collection, my students were expressively irritated by the lack of wall text that could explain the works of art to them. However, when forced to consider William Turner’s Fishing Boats Entering Calais Harbor, they were able to understand the precarious situation of the boat and intuit the frustration of seeing the proximity of the harbor yet being on a boat unlikely to reach it. They noted the
Previously by this author: 7 Essential Modernist Literary Life Hacks. A metaphor is a word or phrase in a foreign language that poets choose to include simply because they are pretentious. The title of William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” provides an example of delusion. When reviewing literature related to your essay topic, you should avoid sources that come from a country with which the United States has recently engaged…
Riane Konc's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
My students will learn to lose and then find themselves again through the existential questions of great literature. Even the most reluctant readers will discover that their closest confidantes and most intimate lovers have been waiting for them in the pages of a book. After a class discussion about Romeo and Juliet versus West Side Story, students from different socioeconomic classes will
Like many of my millennial, direction-less peers, I was looking for something to do after graduating from college in May 2009. I knew Washington, D.C., my hometown, would be happy to add me to the ranks of early twentysomething, non-profit workers who love love love happy hour, “can’t wait to check out that new burger place,” and totally didn’t join a kickball team to meet guys/girls. But alas, I wanted to hold out for a…
Recently, in the rhetoric class I teach at Boston University, we read an essay that included a forward by Arthur Clarke. I opened the discussion by asking who Arthur Clarke was. My students all just looked at me. They must practice variations on the blank stare late at night in the dorms. There’s a bit of deer-in-the-headlights in there, but there’s some defiance too. Rather than skim the reading for hints, they continued to stare…
