Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

My head hurts from this one, but apparently this is a complete, grammatically correct sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Mental Floss has a good explanation of this little grammatical mind-twister. It took me a couple times reading through the article to figure it out. If you're teaching parts of speech, your kids may get a kick out of it. I'd love to see a student explain it through a sentence diagram.

Shakespeare Behind Bars

Paul Moliken, our Senior Editor, just alerted me to this movie -- looks like my Netflix queue is going to be full of Shakespeare for a while.

"If you’ve ever wondered about the redemptive power of literature on an individual’s life, then you owe it to yourself to watch “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” a documentary about a group of men in prison, who put on a performance of The Tempest. Their nearly half year of rehearsal (time counts for nothing in jail) is broken up by “Antonio’s” stretch in solitary confinement and by “Ariel’s” leaving for a maximum security prison. However, the rest of the cast, which is made up of a non-inmate volunteer director, plus murderers, thieves, and other extremely bad men, carry on splendidly.

We see them in rehearsal practicing lines, learning how to deliver them with meaning; we also see them speaking directly to the camera about their crimes and how Shakespeare has prepared them for life, both behind bars and after parole. The insights and personal revelations that the lines bring to these inmates is startling—almost all cry at their understanding of how the Bard, dead for four centuries, can relate to their particular individual weaknesses and to humanity in general.

“Caliban,” a huge, formidable, frightening prisoner, tries everything he can to get into the psyche of the monster. “Miranda” is especially touched by the similarities between himself and the character and feels that their pasts are exactly the same! “Prospero,” a veteran of several past productions, seems to be the most accomplished actor. The rest do overact for the most part, but their enthusiasm is necessary for the production to succeed, since the audience is composed primarily of other prisoners.

I found myself hoping that the two men who had their parole board hearings shortly after filming would be released into society. The Board disagreed with my opinion, however, and denied the paroles.

The cast offers some startling comments about their lives, along with some vulgarities, either of which might offend a lower high school class, but if you’re teaching The Tempest, or would like to offer a class a different perspective on Shakespeare’s genius, the movie is highly recommended."

Outside Writer of the Year!

Congratulations and many thanks to Eva Richardson, our inaugural 2007 Writer of the Year!

We have dozens of writers around the country, many who are former English teachers, who help us develop the many different classroom resources that we're able to put out each year.

This year, we're starting a new tradition of nominating the off-site writer who's done some of the best work this year. It's a difficult decision to make but our Sr. Editor and New Product specialist agreed that this year, Ms. Richardson has gone above and beyond in writing products this year, and we have a lot more projects that she's working on for us.

Congratulations!

By Eva Richardson this year:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Teaching Unit
Animal Farm - AP Teaching Unit
The Grapes of Wrath - AP Teaching Unit
Animal Farm - Multiple Critical Perspectives Guide
The Grapes of Wrath - Multiple Critical Perspectives Guide
Great Expectations - Multiple Critical Perspectives Guide

Slings and Arrows

Jason just let me know about a Candian TV series that's jumped right to the top of my netflix queue called Slings and Arrows. It's a dark comedy about the struggles of a fictional Shakespeare Company, and now that I've seen episode 1, I can't wait to see the rest.

Reading is Fundamental in Crisis

Many of you may be benefiting from Reading is Fundamental's program of inexpensive book distribution for over 4.6 million children, so I thought you might all be interested in the latest news from RIF.

Since Prestwick House is an authorized distributor of materials for RIF, with our inexpensive Literary Touchstone Classics and other classics, we're kept up to date on the goings-on at RIF headquarters.

We were upset to recently receive an E-mail letting us know that RIF's budget for this program has been completely eliminated by the new Bush budget.

The good news is that RIF and their supporters are fighting to get their money back. See what RIF is doing now to get their budget of $26million re-instated and see how you can help RIF.

A Plea to HS English Teachers (From a College Creative Writing Teacher )

Tayari Jones has a very elegant and readable blog. I found it when I happened on this post about how HS students who read:

1) "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
2) "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway
3) "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

...grow up to be stunted creative writers in college.

A New (Sub) Mission

I'm on a mission to get people to read this excellent book blog over at enotes.

Jamie has been doing some heroically cool blogging there with little to no praise and a completely unjust deficit of adoring fans.

Happy Valentines-- err. Fredrick Douglass Day

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

Frederick Douglass

Valentine’s Day isn’t just an excuse to eat chocolates out of a heart-shaped box. For the civic-minded, February 14^th* is also a time to honor the life of Frederick Douglass—a well-known abolitionist and a champion of human rights and education.

For English educators in particular, his life’s story is a study in the transformative power of literacy.

As a twelve-year-old boy, Douglass was transformed from a slave into an aspiring human rights activist when he secretly taught himself to read. In fact, his experience with books affected him so profoundly that he would later call education “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

Within a few years, inspired by what he had read, Douglas would escape slavery and go on to challenge the world with his own words. His numerous abolitionist publications would play a key role in ending slavery in the US.

And that’s precisely why slaves were strictly prohibited from learning to read in the first place. Slave-owners knew that literate people are free people. They won’t be subjugated for long.

You can read more about Douglass’s extraordinary life in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass .

But keep in mind that Douglass is only one of many African-American writers whose words will inspire your class in February and throughout the year. Here are a few other suggestions from among our favorite novels, poems, plays, and nonfiction works.

Classics:

African-American Poetry, An Anthology: 1773—1927 (from Phyllis Wheatley to Langston Hughes)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs

The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois’s legendary treatise

Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston

A Raisin in the Sun, a play by Lorraine Hansberry

Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison (recommended for mature classes)

Contemporary Young Adult:

Gifted Hands, the autobiography of Ben Carson

The Color of Water, an autobiographical novel by James McBride

Slam!, a novel by Walter Dean Myers

The Rose that Grew from Concrete, a poetry anthology by Tupac Shakur

*Douglass didn’t know for sure the day, or even the year, of his birth. He adopted February 14^th as his birthday because his mother called him her “little Valentine.”

The Poe Wars of 2007: or A Tale of At Least Two Cities

It's been a while, but here's a great story from Doug Grudzina, creator and author of many of our top-selling products such as 3 Simple Truths and 6 Essential Traits of Powerful Writing and Prestwick AP Teaching Units.

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It was destined from the start to become an internecine battle of epic proportions. If people had fought for his friendship in his life the way they’re fighting for his remains, he might have lived a vastly different life and had a vastly different career. But, then again, he might have had a vastly different impact on American literature. Still, the brouhaha that has erupted between Philadelphia, PA and Baltimore, MD over which city should hold the distinction of Edgar Allan Poe’s burial place is a conflict unrivaled since that last war between the North and the South.

On Thursday, October 4, Philadelphia writer, reviewer and blogger Edward Pettit threw down the gauntlet. Philadelphia, he claimed in an article in the Philadelphia City Paper— and not Baltimore—should be the final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe:

Philadelphia’s claim to burial rights, according to Pettit is that it was “while living in Philadelphia [that] Poe wrote the bulk of his greatest work.”

“Other cities...be warned,” he contends. “Acolytes of Poe will be flocking to Philadelphia [in 2009to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth] to celebrate our Edgar.” Poe did, after all, live and write in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond. He spent time in West Point and London as well. The man got around.

Still, it was in Baltimore that he died and was buried. Mystery writer—and proud Baltimorean—Laura Lippman immediately joined the fray:

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and this fact is indisputable: We have the body,” she retorts in her City Paper rejoinder. “While it's true that the work he produced in Baltimore is not particularly distinctive,” she parries Pettit’s bulk-of-his-greatest-work thrust, “it was in Baltimore that Poe won a literary contest that was pivotal to his sense of himself as a real writer.”

She continues, “What have you done for Poe lately, Philadelphia? We named our football team the Ravens ... We have a Poe room in our Central Library. We even have a housing project called the Poe Homes ... And it is here, every Jan. 19, that the Poe Toaster comes to pay his respects. Granted, the memorial to Poe gets his birthday wrong, but it was the 19th century, before Google made fact-checking so much easier.”

In case you don’t remember the story, Edgar Allan Poe (who in those days simply went by “Edgar Poe”—Eddie to his friends), was traveling from Richmond, Virginia, to either Philadelphia (where he had a business appointment) or New York (where he lived), when he was found in Baltimore on October 3, 1849. He was delirious, in obvious distress, and dressed in ragged clothing that was not his. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died early on the morning of October 7. He was never coherent long enough to explain why he was in Baltimore and how he came to be in such a predicament. The precise cause of Poe's death remains a mystery although there are numerous theories. His funeral—in Baltimore on October 8—lasted barely three minutes, and was attended by a mere seven people.

Poe was originally buried in his family’s plot in a neglected and overgrown back corner of the Westminster burying ground of the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. In 1875, he was exhumed and reburied under a huge marble monument closer to the front of the cemetery. The monument was paid for in part by donations from Baltimore’s school children and in part by a sizeable donation from a George W. Childs—of Philadelphia.

Once the battle lines were drawn, everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action: and the issue escalated from turf war to outright cultural crusade. Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozzella asserts that it is no wonder that “A city known for a bell that's broken and a delicacy that's Cheez Whiz-ed” would want to enhance its cultural reputation by stealing Edgar Allan Poe from Baltimore. Sparring against Pettit’s main point she writes, “It was here in Baltimore... where he wrote his first true horror story.”

Baltimore is also where Poe met his cousin and future wife Virginia Clemm. If Philadelphia is so desperate for a famous corpse, Vozella offers, they can have John Wilkes Booth.

Then things got really ugly. On Wednesday, October 10, Philly’s Daily Examiner blogger A.J. Daulerio responded to the Cheez-Whiz crack by calling Baltimoreans “crabcake-stuffed cranks.” City Paper managing editor Brian Hickey wrote of Baltimore’s “offer” to give Philly the body of Booth, “I’d expect nothing less from the syphilis capital of the universe.”

On Thursday (October 11), Boston blogger Jeremy Dibbell, who describes himself as a “bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and library science/history grad student at Simmons College” declined to enter Boston into the arena.

“We'll let Baltimore and Philly fight this one out,” he writes, “we wouldn't want to rile up the Brahmins.” Granted, he notes Poe was born in Boston and did sign his first published work Tamerlane and Other Poems, “By A Bostonian.” But Poe and his work were not well-received in Boston. Poe and the other Boston literati did not get along well, and Poe would eventually write that he was “ashamed” to have been born in Beantown. Dibbell quotes a January 28 story in the Boston Globe "His name is not routinely uttered on tours of the city, nor does it appear among the 1,000-plus attractions on the city's tourism website. Boston has neither a Poe statue nor a Poe museum—only a small plaque commemorating his birthplace on the outside wall of a luggage store.” Author Matthew Pearl, however, in an October 18 e-mail to Ed Pettit seems to hint at wanting to pick up the gauntlet on behalf of Boston. Pettit’s reply is a hearty bring it on.

Still Philly and Baltimore, both proud of their associations with the tortured poet, are at the forefront of the mêlée. On Sunday the 14^th, Vozella defended her city against Hickey’s attack
insisting that Baltimore was only fourth on the list of syphilis capitals of the world.

 “Philly didn't mind when Baltimore beat back the Brits in 1814,” she writes, “but we defend our most famous author and -- sheesh!”

Finally, on Monday, October 15, the Philadelphia Inquirer couldn’t resist piping in. Book critic Carlin Romano claims: “At one minute after midnight on Sunday—notably after deadline—a dark-haired figure in black cape and boots tossed two sheets of paper into The Inquirer's lobby, then fled. They contained only a poem, written in black ink, apparently in third person... ‘The War Over E.A.P.’ (With Apologies to My Darling, My Darling, Annabel Lee).” The text of the mysterious poem is here.

And that, given Pettit’s Bibliothecary entry of October 18, in which he welcomes Boston’s entry into the tussle, is the closest to an up-to-the-minute report on the Poe Wars we can offer. If you know of any more recent updates, let us know.

Meanwhile, there’s a LOT a teacher can do with his or her kids—research Poe’s life, read the works allegedly written during Poe’s stays in his myriad homes, and have an informed debate on who has the ultimate right to claim the poet’s remains. Maybe they’ll decide, as Pearl concludes in his e-mail to Pettit, “one of the extraordinary and potent things about Poe is that he doesn't belong to any one home, city, country. He's forever the orphan.”

Pirates in the Classroom

Ahoy!

As some of you may know, today, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Here at Prestwick House, an occasional "arrr" or "avast" can be heard throughout the office.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with teaching or English language arts. Thanks to some great information posted on the official web site for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, you too can partake in a fun pirate-themed day and make it educational for your students! The site lists pirate curriculum and lesson plans (and links) from other teachers, including:

• 4th to 6th grade language arts lesson plans
• Some world history, social studies, and math lesson plans (you could share with other teachers)
• A Talk Like a Pirate Day lesson plan based on Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Perhaps you could show the video of Treasure Island, or begin using our Teaching Unit which includes nautical, pirate and general vocabulary, a multiple choice and short essay test, as well as discussion questions.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is already upon us, but now you can start planning for next year's events, even if yer a landlubber!