I’m still tossing around some ideas on how to conduct a sex, dating, and relationship workshop. I found a “Sexual Pressures” curriculum aimed at middle schoolers that had a nice list of discussion questions to get students thinking deeply about sex and relationships: What is the difference between love and Read more…
In “Blame it on the brain” I touched on how emerging research on the “teen brain” should make us reevaluate how we address the problem of risky behavior among youth. One especially sensitive area is sex ed. My interest, however, lies not in discussing various forms of contraception or the responsibilities of teen parenthood, but in getting young people to think deeply about emotional intimacy and healthy relationships. This aspect of teen sexuality is often overlooked, and this oversight leaves young people without any guidance on how to develop meaningful, intimate bonds even beyond their teens and early twenties. (more…)
I just finished reading William Bridges‘s Creating You & Co. for my own personal purposes, but it ended up being useful for my Finding Your Calling workshop because the author’s description of how to work effectively in an increasingly “dejobbed” world resonates surprisingly well with the premise of my Coming Read more…
I’ve been doing some research on the teenage brain lately. Frontline’s program on the teen brain is a particularly informative and entertaining look at why teenagers behave in ways that are maddening to the adults around them and confounding even to themselves. So what’s the scientific explanation for the mood Read more…
As a high school student I remember learning to recognize figurative language in poetry by memorizing a long list of figures of speech—an exercise I repeated years later in graduate school but with all the terms in Spanish. It’s a tedious process that pays off when you finally have all the definitions memorized, not only because it can heighten your experience of literature, but also because you will inevitably realize the great extent to which figurative language permeates our everyday speech. Getting there, however, is not much fun.
I want to take a different approach to teaching figurative language by making students more active in the learning process. The strategy is simple: instead of working off a handout or textbook that lists figures of speech with accompanying definitions and examples, my handout will omit the definitions entirely. Students will be asked to craft their own definitions for various figures of speech by examining the examples given (with the pertinent words/phrases highlighted), hazarding a tentative definition, and then sharing and refining their guesses in class discussion.
Here is what I’ve selected for the term simile: (more…)
In my post on “The Shawl” I show how a somewhat bibliotherapeutic approach to the story can be facilitated by following a central image through close reading. We can take a similar approach to Susan Perabo’s “Some Say the World,” which originally appeared in TriQuarterly (sometime between 1994-1996, according to various sources), but which I am reading from Frosch’s Coming of Age in the 21st Century. I’m considering teaching this story in my Critical Approaches to the ‘Family’ Program because it tells the story from the perspective of a teenager living in a broken and dysfunctional family who ends up finding a family bond with a parental figure who is not her blood relation. The protagonist is a young, heavily-medicated pyromaniac stuck at home playing Parcheesi with her stepfather while her irresponsible, self-absorbed mother carries on a regular affair with her ex-husband, the protagonist’s estranged father. Predictably, the central image in the story is fire. (more…)
I’d been toying with the idea of building a program around fairy tales and their retellings. There must be something in the air because this fall NBC began airing Grimm shortly after ABC launched Once Upon a Time. I’m taking the recent trailer releases of two (of the three?) upcoming Read more…
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of coming of age narratives—mostly from Coming of Age in the 21st Century, an anthology I would recommend to anyone interested in the topic. One story that really stands out for me is “The Shawl” by Louise Erdrich (you can download a pdf of it here). I’m definitely including it in the Dealing with Parents and the Past workshop within my Coming of Age program and I’ll probably teach it in the Critical Approaches to the ‘Family’ program that I’m developing. What really struck me about the story was how the narrator (and the reader does not immediately know that he is also the protagonist) manages to turn a traumatic family story—one that carries the tremendous weight of myth—into a narrative of heroic martyrdom. In the process, the protagonist also succeeds in redefining his relationship to his abusive, alcoholic father, who is all but destroyed by that past. (more…)
In this economy millions of Americans would be grateful to be employed, but there are few people who could really say that it is their job that gets them out of bed every morning. True, we all know people with successful careers, but the happiest of all are those who find their work truly fulfilling. These are the people who have found their calling.
Some might argue that finding your calling is something for the lucky few who are either blessed by circumstance or extraordinarily talented, but I firmly believe that every young person has something inside him or her that is waiting to be tapped. We do not have to be veritable geniuses to give something valuable to the world. By virtue of being unique individuals, we all have special gifts or particular interests that can be transformed into fulfilling work. This may be a remunerated job, unpaid service in the community, or the tremendous task of raising kids. Short of saying that “anything is possible” (I loathe that sort of self-help babble), I do think that every young person should dream big. They may not immediately have all the resources they need, but they have time on their side. With a little systematic work, everyone can at least determine what he or she is called to do in life.
Below is an exercise I’ve designed for participants to work on in my Finding Your Calling workshop, which is also within my Coming of Age program. In the context of a mentoring workshop, I think it would be great if mentors worked with their protégés (“mentees” in mentoring parlance) in answering these questions. (more…)
I consider the Rites of Passage workshop not only the centerpiece of my Coming of Age program but my entire Minds on Fire project because, intellectually, it was where I started when I first confronted the issue of how we get young people today to think about becoming adults. My Read more…