Planning next year's curriculum

I'm going to try to get back into the habit of writing regularly, now that the school year has ended.

This summer is a big one for me. I'm teaching a new course next year - IB 4, the class with our highest-level seniors - and have the freedom to construct the curriculum myself. The list from which I have to choose is fairly strict, but I have complete flexibility within it.

A colleague is heading off to the Steinbeck Summer Institute this summer - the same sort of thing I did with Shakespeare and the Folger Library last summer. She and I will share those same Seniors, but she teaches them in a non-English class, so I'm considering choosing a Steinbeck novel and letting her do her thing with it in her class and me do my thing with it in my class. I've always been a Steinbeck fan (read Grapes of Wrath as a 9th grader, and, even though I'm sure I didn't understand much of it, I remember loving it; and I love Of Mice and Men), but have never read East of Eden, her favorite novel. I'm currently engrossed in it. It might be too long to teach, but maybe not; it's a page turner and since I'm also teaching Song of Solomon next year, I think kids might be intrigued by figuring out all the Biblical Allusions.

We'll see. I've got a lot of reading to do this summer, and I'm looking forward to it, and hopefully I'll be blogging about it.