Teachers are always on the lookout for timely examples of concepts we are about to present in class. This example of irony just hit my inbox: a factory in China discovered that the thousands of colorful flags they were producing were actually “Free Tibet” emblems. Police suspect some may appear in demonstrations when the Olympic torch passes through Hong Kong.

The Website Despair.com has good ironic visuals. (Warning — while the site is intended to be humorous, it may be dangerous for teachers in the spring. Don’t stay on the site long. You’ll see what I mean.) My favorites include “Ambition,” “Do It Later,” and “Loneliness.”

Whitelies.tv offers irony appropriate for classroom use on a couple of levels. Produced by an anti-smoking group, the commercial shows a widow explaining that her husband had always planned to start a healthier lifestyle a little later in his life. The day before his 50th birthday, they learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. It ends with this chilling statement: “Gary said he wouldn’t smoke after he turned 50. He was right.”

We have to make sure students understand the concept before we turn them loose with the fifth act of Romeo and Juliet or Jonathan Swift’s classic, “A Modest Proposal.” How do YOU introduce irony?

In honor of National Poetry Month, ten definitions of poetry by Carl Sandburg:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break the silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
3. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
4. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
5. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief notted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
6. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
7. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
8. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
9. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
10. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

Pat, an English professor in Kansas, writes the following:

NOTE: Normally I blog mainly for myself, but I hope this entry gets passed on to healthcare and communication educators, who can perhaps help their students understand that language matters.

Anyone who has said a final good-bye to someone they love will understand the point of her blog: how we communicate something is at least as important as what we say; the “other damage” she refers to should have been avoided.

I last had a conversation with Mom the night of December 9, 2007. We said “goodnight” on the phone at 7:30 as she was getting ready for bed. Sometime before 5:45 that next morning Mom had a massive stroke. Mom is dead, and I’m fully aware that a timely arrival at the hospital would have not made a difference for her ultimate fate. Her stroke was hemorrhagic; the bomb in her head had already gone off, and the damage was irrevocable. But there was other damage done by the delay, and a healthcare professional with stronger communication skills could have made a difference.

When the nurse found her, Mom’s face was sagging; her speech was slurred; she seemed paralyzed on one side; her tongue was swollen; and she had difficulty swallowing. Those were her symptoms. I know these because the RN listed them when she called me at 5:50 immediately after she called 911. Unfortunately, according to the documentation, that nurse hadn’t shared those symptoms with 911. Instead she gave a diagnosis: “possible stroke.”

Zeroing in on “possible” and the nurse’s statement that Mom was still conscious, the dispatcher assigned the case to the lowest priority of transfer. A stroke victim would be transferred to the hospital as convenient.

Read the remainder of Pat’s blog to learn how the problem was compounded by other people’s lapses, making a bad situation worse than it had to be.

This blog entry could serve as a model for a writing lesson. Pat narrates, describes, analyzes, and uses an understated voice — especially in her final sentence — to make a simple point: whether it’s a professional call for help or just a mother speaking her daughter’s name, language matters.

For this entry thanks — again! — to Alex.

Now that baseball season has started, it seems appropriate to review that baseball classic by Abbott and Costello, “Who’s on First?” Through the years there have been many parodies, but nothing beats the original. Enjoy!

Think Aloud is a reading strategy designed to model the way good readers “think through” a text to understand it. It’s often used for remediation in middle and high school classrooms.

Greece Central School District in North Greece, New York, has established a rich repository of instructional strategies and resources, and Think Aloud is one of them.

From the site:

Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers.

This strategy underscores the importance of modeling reading for our students. When I begin “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I use this approach because I know Poe’s style intimidates readers — sometimes even strong readers. It help to pause and think now and then, to reflect and predict. By the time the house collapses, students are comfortable using this approach on their own.

The team at the National Writing Project has recently redesigned their website, and if you haven’t visited before, now’s the time. Here are a few of the categories you can browse:

• Teaching Writing (an extensive list of resources)
• Teaching Reading
• Professional Development
• Research in Writing and Assessment
• Teacher Research/Inquiry
• Being a Writer

If you register at the site (fast and free), more resources are available, too. If you think there might be more to teaching writing than grammar exercises and the 5-paragraph essay, this site — and this program — are for you!

Many of us have seen this humorous e-mail before. (My favorite part is the signature at the end.) Somebody has to write them, though, and I wonder if this e-mail could be used as a model for a writing assignment. The prompt would reading something like “Write the directions for a process that could result in this picture.” The task would require a collection of pictures for students to choose from, each picture suggesting that something just happened, but not making clear just what it was.

While the focus would be on making the process clear, perhaps extra credit could be given for humor.

Washing the Cat

1. Put both lids of the toilet up and add 1/8 cup of pet shampoo to the water in the bowl.
2. Pick up the cat and soothe him while you carry him towards the bathroom.
3. In one smooth movement, put the cat in the toilet and close both lids. You may need to stand on the lid.
4. The cat will self agitate and make ample suds. Never mind the noises that come from the toilet, the cat is actually enjoying this.
5. Flush the toilet three or four times. This provides a “power-wash” and “rinse.”
6. Have someone open the front door of your home. Be sure that there are no people between the bathroom and the front door.
7. Stand behind the toilet as far as you can, and quickly lift both lids.
8. The cat will rocket out of the toilet, streak through the bathroom, and run outside where he will dry himself off.

Both the commode and the cat will be sparkling clean.

Sincerely,
The Dog

The Academy of American Poets has designated today “Poem in Your Pocket” Day, a day to keep a copy of one of your favorite poems handy and to share it with others.

Here’s the poem in my pocket today:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

–Walt Whitman

Whitman’s poem affirms the value of one experience without deprecating the other, acknowledging, for example, that there’s a time to learn from others and a time to learn for oneself, a time to be in large groups and a time to be alone, a time to be indoors and a time to be with nature, a time for science and math and a time for simple magic. As a Romantic and Transcendentalist, Whitman prefers solitude, nature, and things that can’t quite be explained. He encourages each reader to follow the heart.

What poem’s in your (literal or figurative) pocket today?