Did this really happen? I thought to myself as my dad kept going on about interning Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII.  I finally asked the question out loud and everyone in the room nodded their heads.  I was shocked because I’d never been told about this event in school.  And to quote Joe Bidden, “It’s a big “f@!$%ing deal…”.  I trusted my family’s affirmation that the event happened because most of my grandma’s family lived in the Bay Area during WWII.  One question […]

I always thought I asked good questions.  I even referred to my Bloom’s Taxonomy guide so that I was asking higher order thinking questions.  But after reading Essential Questions by McTighe & Wiggins, I realized that my questions always led to an answer.  A dead-end if you will.  Or, in the case of evaluative questions, an answer that was unique to each student.  And those times when I was able to generate a good discussion in my classroom, I honestly didn’t know what I did […]

By the time you get through high school and college you think you’ve read enough to understand what it was like living under slavery in the South.  But you don’t.  And you can’t.  I’ve read Frederick Douglass and just recently completed reading 12 Years a Slave.  Each work opened my eyes to the evils of slavery.  Not just the demoralizing and the degradation of the slaves, the cruelty and the animal-like behavior that slave owners acquired as slavery corrupted them.  Yet I’ve never read about […]

Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac was a tough read for me.  I have been looking for a book by Native Americans regarding the Native American community.  This particular work focuses on the Navajo code talkers in WWII in the Pacific Theater.  The code talkers and the important role they played in WWII is a topic that not many know about but who should.  Which is why I read it to preview for my students.  But now I’m having second thoughts. It’s not because of the […]

I had heard so much about it that I assumed I knew what the plot was going to be all about.  I was wrong. And the author was in on the duping.  A story as widely known as this, all of his readers were informed, to more or less, the same degree.  And because the author knew this he had quite a challenge on his hands.  And I had preconceived notions to dismiss. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, is the journalistic telling of the […]