Presents an excerpt from Katherine Neville's best-selling novel "The Eight," and discusses how the excerpt could be used in a mathematics class. Includes possible class activities and reading and writing assignments. (SR)

Suggests that awkwardness in writing (like good writing) is an interactive nexus of writer, text, and reader and is a matter of subjective judgment. Argues that awkwardness in student writing is a positive sign of a writer's grappling with language complexity. Concludes that awkwardness is rhetorically motivated and therefore complex but…

Describes using the process method to teach news writing. Emphasizes its usefulness in writing for the reader and editing. (SR)

Demonstrates the prevalence of the problem of educators consensual, conventional characterization of language. Suggests an alternative, more dynamic way to describe social groups, and shows how this alternative can be used in the writing classroom. (PRA)

Describes a project in which preservice teachers and sixth grade students exchanged correspondence. Notes that the preservice teachers learned important things about the writing of sixth graders. Finds that the students' abilities in letter writing developed without direct instruction. (RS)

Describes a spur-of-the-moment curriculum development activity involving primary-school students researching the "real" Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo behind the names of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Notes that the products of the research were shared during a classroom pizza party. (RS)

Discusses a letter-writing assignment in which students write five letters over the course of the semester to anyone they wish about material they read in their U.S. literature class. Describes how the assignment elicited writing in which the students were personally invested, leading to their greater involvement in the class as a whole. (SR)

Describes how a teacher integrated an audio cassette version of a Ray Bradbury story into a computer-supported creative writing project in her seventh-grade literature class. (SR)

Describes a method of teaching professional expository writing skills in which a teacher wrote to real professional people, some famous, and asked them to become "clients" for first-year student researchers by requesting specific information. Argues for the feasibility and success of this project. (HB)

Describes how, through oral story telling, writing biographies, autobiographies and creating fictional characters, adults with mental illness were gently directed to focus and explore one significant person or period of their own lives, to develop their sense of self and ego strengths, and to connect to important others in their lives. (SR)

Argues that humor is an invaluable teaching tool in English classes. Describes how the author and her students: found humor an important means of discovering profound truths in Shakespeare's dramas; enjoyed the epic "Paradise Lost"; worked with satire in Chaucer; and used humor in students' own creative activities. (SR)

Describes an assignment in a corporate-communications class in which students examine the design and the language of their apartment leases. Discusses how this assignment teaches students about the Plain English laws and the need for plain English in leases and in ethics. (SR)

Examines the types of literacy support parents gave their children at home with 15 students from a diverse class of 23 third graders during an eight-week integrated unit on writing autobiographies. Finds pattern differences between genders with respect to the nature of support given at home. Suggests that particularly African-American males…

Proposes assigning polemics, suasive essays, and paradoxical encomia as a means to help students write in classical civic discourse forms, which enfranchise the personal in the service of the community. Presents guidelines for each assignment. (NH)

Argues that any curriculum of peace must have at its core the teaching (not preaching) of empathy. Recommends ecphrastic poetry (poetic response to works of art) as a teaching tool for empathy, and discusses how the author uses one particular poem written in response to a World War II photograph to stimulate student writing response and…