The Beginning!

It's my first post for my summer fellowship, provided by a grant from Fund for Teachers and the Oklahoma Council for Excellence. I can't wait to get started! I'll be visiting Massachusetts and New Hampshire to see the homes of some of my favorite authors to teach and to study: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. I'll also spend time investigating the area around Salem, where The Crucible is set, based on the all-too-real horrors of the Salem Witch Trials.

All of these experiences I hope to bring to the classroom to stoke the interest of my students in studying the literature. The love of and respect for nature that these authors had is something we already share here in our beautiful Green Country home; I want to bring evidence of the natural world of New England to my students and highlight it in the authors' works to excite my students' interest. They gravitate toward the drama of The Crucible, finding it bizarre that the society of Salem believed that witches made cattle and pigs die, sent out spirits to torture others, and signed contracts with Satan. Like Arthur Miller, the author, I hope they'll see the similarities between that witch hunt and those that still take place today. Again, bringing the setting home to my students is the jumping-off place for new ideas I can implement into the unit.

This Tuesday, April 20th, we have our awards signing at OSU-Tulsa. We'll get part of our grant money then, so I can begin scheduling my travel after that. I hope to go the last week of June and first week of July, before the hottest weather, but after spring rains, to have the optimum amount of time to wander the outdoors in Frost's White Mountains and the green valleys of western Massachusetts, where Miss Emily Dickinson "taste[d] a liquor never brewed." I can hardly wait to drink from the same spring!