Category Archives: creative solutions

We will start our days at TLC Middle School by reading the day’s news.  Today, the main story is obvious — what happened at the Boston Marathon?

This was an awful raw event, and my thoughts and prayers are with the people of Boston, my home town. Thankfully, all of my family and friends are accounted for and safe — but it’s been a gut-wrenching 24 hours.

As of mid-day on Tuesday, April 16, we don’t know a lot beyond these basics, from the Boston Globe: two bombs went off near the finish line of the Marathon; three people have been killed; more than 170 have been injured, and 17 are in critical condition.

A lesson I learned as a young teacher 15 years ago is that it’s crucial, before starting a discussion with student about an emotional topic such as this one, to see if any students in…

In the preface of the book, the authors give an explanation as to how they came to write the biography. Initially, they said, they were just going to write a book that included information about her missionary work, only to realize that she was a book unto herself. In 1968, they attended a church service in Germany. The authors listened to two speakers who had both been prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. They note that the first speaker, understandably, showed the deep pain that he not only felt then but continues to feel in his everyday life. The second speaker, Corrie, they said, “radiated love, peace and joy”, words that I would not have imagined to describe someone who had gone through what someone like herself had. The authors, so taken aback by her spirit, stayed behind afterwards and talked to her. They learned that Corrie was spending her…

“Be true to the story,” remarks the main character in N. Scott Momaday’s novel, The Ancient Child.  He is an artist from whose paintings a mysterious figure begins to emerge over time.  The features of this apparition make it bear-like, and the painter must stay true to the story of this bear’s surfacing.  He fights to face the bear, as unsettling as this struggle might be.

I was reminded of Momaday’s novel, while reading yesterday’s obituary of Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, whose novel, Things Fall Apart, has made, and keeps making, a remarkable global impact since its publication in 1958.  This obituary includes John Updike’s  assessment that Achebe “grabbed the subject of colonialism ‘so firmly and fairly’ that the book’s tragedy, like Greek tragedy, felt tonic; a space had been cleared, an understanding had been achieved, a new beginning was implied” (NYTimes, 23 Mar 2013: A14).  Updike’s…

Here’s a great example of how a news article we might read in the morning at TLC Middle School can be used as a springboard to learn in a truly multi-disciplinary way.

Let’s look at this recent NPR feature about grapes, which caught my attention both with the picture and the clever headline:

At TLC Middle School, here’s how we might discuss this article.

First, we would all read the NPR article (go ahead and read it — it’s not long).

The article describes how one part of plants work:

Plants have two types of pipes in their stems: the xylem and the phloem. The xylem pumps water to the leaves from the roots, while the phloem sends food from the leaves back down to the roots.

After we read that, I’m pretty sure we could find an image of xylem and phloem from an online biology text…  Yep —…