Literary Scrabble

Last night, I lost at Scrabble to my husband and my college-aged nephew, but had a thought. If I were teaching this year, I'd have the Scrabble board out for students to wander in and add letters. Then I had another thought: confine the words to literary terminology or characters. Granted, it's not the deepest, most profound use of class time, but might be a nice thing to do on the day a huge assignment is due or on the day before the holidays.

Has anyone ever used Scrabble in this way?

Note well!

http://vichist.blogspot.com

To those of you who teach the Victorians, I recommend this link to a blog devoted to the topic!

You tell me!

Two questions:

1. What has been your experience with Young Adult literature, as opposed to having older children read such classics as Little Women?
2. Is there a set of novels that appeal more to boys than girls and vice versa? Why? What?

Enjoy the last days of your summer vacation and blog me back!

The Unemployed English Teacher

Julia Child movie

As a lover of George Eliot's Middlemarch and as one who has taught it several times, I see so many parallels between GE's Dorothea and Julia/Julie in this delightful film. If I were fortunate enough to be an employed English teacher, I would explore these affinities with my class. Ditto for Cather's Song of the Lark and Wharton's House of Mirth. This is a movie worth seeing for English teachers.

• Do human beings want to work? Do you?
• How does going to work affect the lives of men? of women?
• Why does each female character (Dorothea, Julia, Julie) chafe at idleness?
• What is the place of work in the course of identity formation?
• What work do you want to do in your future?
• Explore the experiences of working women in another country.

I lied.

I'm not so much unemployed as I am underemployed. Due to the economic downturn, I had to remain in my current job--public relations, grant writing, and marketing--at my current school. I am an English teacher with 35 years of experience at both the college and the secondary level.
I have written articles, a book, and papers that I have delivered at conferences.
I now sit at a desk in a large workroom that I share with two other people.
They have cell phones that ring frequently.
They leave the ringers on.