Joe's Journal

 If I were to redesign the cover the Persepolis  by Marjane Satrapi I would try to design it so it allowed someone to get a better understanding of what the book is about just by looking at it. The actual cover is fairly simple. It features the title with the statement "The story of a childhood" below the title, which doesn't even indicate who's childhood the story is about. It also has a picture of Marji in a veil looking forward with her arms crossed. Just by looking at the current cover, the only thing a viewer would gather about the book is that it is about a girls childhood. They would also probably assume that the girl is of Islamic faith due to the veil. The viewer wouldn't know anything else about the context and may wonder, "Why should I care about this childhood?"  I would change the statement below the title from 'The story of a childhood" to something more descriptive such as "The story of my childhood during the Iranian Revolut...

 Out of all 359 pages of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz,  there was one passage that stood out to me more than any other part of the book. The passage is as follows:     I don't know why, but I couldn't stop crying. And then I stopped and I knew I was really angry. More angry than I'd ever been in my life. "There were four of them. The other boy ran. But Dante didn't run. Because Dante's like that. He doesn't run."     I looked at my dad.      He didn't say a word.     My mother had moved closer to me. She couldn't stop combing my hair with her fingers.     "I'm so ashamed," I whispered. "I wanted to hurt them back."     "Ari?" My father's voice was soft. "Ari, Ari, Ari.  Your fighting this war in the worst possible way."     "I don't know how to fight it, Dad."     "You should ask for help," he said.   ...

I plan to teach  The Graveyard Book  by Neil Gaiman for the 6 th  grave level. Some things I would like to include in my unit plan are weekly poems, themes of gothic literature, character analysis, creative writing/drawing, research on graveyards, and a compare and contrast essay between the book and the focus poems. Something specific I would like to include is having the students write their own gothic literature and illustrate it (possibly in comic form).    One question I have is how long should each lesson be planned to take? I noticed in some of the examples, the lessons are 50 minutes. Should we aim for that length? Another question is how do we know how much time students will need for things like a research essay or a creative writing essay? Is there a good way to gauge this and estimate the time effectively?   Some things I still need to determine is how to split some of the longer chapters and how to assess the students learning. I am thinking we...

 "Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear." (350)     This passage was critical moment in the development of death as a character/narrator. This moment is when death shows that amongst all the terrible things going on, they are there to offer support and compassion to the dying in their final  moments. I think this shows some of the inner torment that death means when it talks about how humanity haunts it. Death sees all the good and evil in humanity, yet is still there to offer compassion in humans dying moments. "He lay in bed with one of his sisters. She must have kicked him or muscled her way into the majority of the bed space because he was on the very edge with his arm around her. The boy slept. His candlelit hair ign...