The aim of this piece was to model the skills of analysis for a classic poem. The piece was written around the fifth week of a set of sessions on “Animalia Poetry”. I consider poetry to provide excellent opportunities for the development of both critical and creative skills, and through such activities with me students […]
I love my work 🙂 Most mornings I wake up with the birds and head into my study with a coffee to log on and collaborate with students to further develop our studies together. They send me questions, plans, reflections and products to demonstrate what they are doing and to seek my involvement, whether it […]
What is justice, and what is injustice? Ok, this is my discursive/expository essay and I get to start it however I like. I therefore choose to start it with Erin Brokovich. Don’t complain – I could have instead gone for Steven Seagal’s lemon Out For Justice, so really you should be thanking me! The 2000 […]
This is yet another 15 min short piece, this time in response to the image/prompt of “I stood outside the door, my pulse racing. Summoning my greatest store of courage, I took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped inside…”. This seems immediately to be a prompt for a creative piece. My purpose here […]
I’ve read the first chapter or two. Immediately I recognise that a book like this is the absolute antithesis of Ernest Hemmingway’s work. Like a hard-nosed Puritan, Hemmingway set out to strip all frivolous animation and fun and phantasms from writing, and to present simple, direct, stark naked descriptions. Obviously the previous sentence does not […]
I am, and always have been, an avid reader (and writer!). Reading is many things, including: a habit; a skill; a tool; a challenge; a pleasure; a terrible seven-letter word; a wonderful opportunity. I’m lucky – I know a lot about reading! One of my jobs as a mentor to gifted students is to recognise […]
This post serves to present some of the pedagogical matters I seek to address in mentoring gifted students, and to demonstrate the methods by which these different matters may be achieved. For a word document version of much better presentation and formatting than what is shown here email me at [email protected]. Van-Tassel Baska (1986) describes […]
The aim of this piece was to exercise the skill of composing a narrative using an interesting structural device. There are many such narrative devices that can be exercised to form a narrative that realises greater suspense or intrigue at different stages of the story, including epigrams, flashbacks, cliffhangers etc. In this piece, the structural […]
VCE English does require students to analyse texts, both in Outcome 1 and Outcome 3. The curriculum is not the same in Scotland where the focus for the analysis of literary techniques is much greater. I have found the pursuit of strong literary analysis to be extremely beneficial to students. In VCE English, students can […]
The following presents two sets of activities to engender responses to the text The Web 2027 with respect to the concepts of “Connectivity” and “Virtual Reality”. Gifted students specifically benefit from study that focuses on concepts and relations between concepts, and enables engagement with content through differentiated learning activities (eg. Paradox, Attribute Listing etc…). Although […]
