Category: Sue's Blog

Book-a-Day Whiteboards #3: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

12/8/2017

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Read: Dec. 4, 2017
Thumbs: Middle Up
But why, Sue? I enjoyed this book and found myself making lots of connections to other texts and genres, including Sister Soulja's The Coldest Winter Ever (a book I don't love, but whose popularity is significant) and blaxploitation cinema of the '70s. The Hate U Give draws from such sources, but creates something contemporary, rich, and intense.
My main issue is the book's length, which doesn't seem necessary enough to make up for the readers it might put off - readers who, possibly, would love this book most.

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Book-a-Day Whiteboards #1: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

12/3/2017

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Book: Ghost by Jason Reynolds (2016)
Thumbs: Up
But why, Sue? This is a satisfying story about a boy's process toward figuring out who he is and who he wants to be through mentoring, friendship, and track. There are a lot of opportunities for teaching here, and compelling minor questions around measurement and categorization that add depth to the narrative. I want to read its sequel/partner Patina now.
A note on Reynolds' style: Here and in the Reynolds co-authored All American Boys, there's what I assume is a purposeful choice to almost never use race labels as a way to identify characters. Tell me if I'm wrong, because I haven't gone back and done a careful study of it. But I like it.

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October 13th, 2017

10/13/2017

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Teaching and learning online

I made the Poetry/Pedagogy website over summer 2017. It's not my first attempt at a blog or website, and I definitely need to do a search to find the detritus I have left in my wake and clean it up. This attempt feels different, though; there's so much that I want to share widely and publicly in terms of resources, ideas, and the on-the-ground work that's making things feel pretty meaningful, if always also unstable, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana right now.

You'll find a number of tabs on this site; some lead to publications of various sorts in a range of media by me and others. What I'm most excited about at the moment is the ENGL4302: Spoken Word Poetry & Pedagogy tab. This is an upper-level undergraduate class I'm teaching this semester (Fall 2017), and despite my trepidations about my own organizational skills, I've committed to bringing the class online by making the students' work public. I hope this practice will help to up the stakes for students in terms of their investment in their writing and research, since a public audience puts a bit more pressure on one to perform at a high level. Also, though, this turns the students into teachers who are sharing information as they learn, and it establishes a place where we can do some work together with students in McKinley High School's Humanities Amped Creative Writing elective before and after both classes meet together this month.

I think this website is where my teaching is going to start to live. Look for a new tab that houses my course syllabi and accompanying readings/resources soon :-)

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Book-a-Day Whiteboards #3: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

Book-a-Day Whiteboards #1: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

October 13th, 2017

Teaching and learning online

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