In which I blog about teaching college courses and researching American Haredi children’s literature. And sometimes medieval British literature or medieval Ashkenazic literature and childhood.
Joy and Accomplishment: Creative Assignments Teach Better Than Essays
I’ve been including a creative assignment in most of my classes for a while now. Most of the time, this…
Keep readingAnnouncing! Summer Book Club
Got a tween or teen who needs some structure this summer? Sign them up for fun reading and writing with…
Keep readingKlal Yisrael’s Guarantee:Children as the Key to Messianic Redemption in Haredi Musical and Textual Culture
I presented this paper at the CUNY Graduate Center’s English Students Association annual conference on March 11, 2021. Pieces of…
Keep readingThe Worst of Times, the Best of Times
This semester has been so weird. And yet, it’s been amazing. I sat at my desk in my home office…
Keep readingCall for Papers: Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhood
Thanks to an amazing series of serendipitous events, I am under contract with Ben Yehuda Press and am soliciting essays…
Keep readingOnline Teaching: A New Semester, A New Plan
Over the past few days on Twitter, there’s been a lot of talk about reassessing and re-evaluating methods used in…
Keep readingFrom Scandal to Emotional Vulnerability: The Trajectory of OTD Memoirs and Fiction
On October 29, 2020, over 60 people tuned in from all over the world to participate in “On the Margins…
Keep readingTeaching in the Time of Corona: Look, Ma! No Plans!
A week ago, I posted the instructions for moving online that I sent to my students. (Was it really only…
Keep readingOnline YA Class: Day 1 (Setting Things Up + The Inexplicable Logic of My Life)
When CUNY shut down for a week, my class was at the tail end of reading and discussing Benjamin Alire…
Keep readingOnline Teaching During a Pandemic: Two Syllabi
This past week has been a flurry of more global, more intense collegiality than I’ve ever witnessed. It comes as…
Keep readingSharing Spaces, Shaping Identities: American Haredi Children’s Literature
On Friday, March 6, 2020, I presented a paper at NeMLA in Boston. It was a fantastic experience. This was…
Keep readingSpring 2020: English 301 & English 336
English 301: British Literature, Origins to 1660 Last semester, I tried something new with my early Brit Lit survey class.…
Keep readingData-Mining Olomeinu Magazines
Over the past few months, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole that’s hard to dig myself out of – and…
Keep readingGoing Maverick: Writing Textbooks and Superheroes
Once again this semester, I’m teaching composition at a new campus. Ah, the life of an adjunct! This time I…
Keep readingLessons in Club Creation: A Group Activity
In my composition class this week, my students read an essay by Gabriela Moro, “Minority Student Clubs: Segregation or Integration?”…
Keep readingSynthesizing Class Discussion and Essay Assignments
“I was able to construct my syllabus and assignments so that the ‘talking about the book’ portion directly teaches about essay-writing.”
Keep readingSyllabus Hunt
On the first day of my English 101 class, I had my students do an activity I called “Syllabus Hunt.”…
Keep readingThe Fun Begins: Fall 2019 Syllabi
There’s just about a week left before classes start. I’m teaching two classes this semester: a survey of medieval and…
Keep readingCFP: Sharing Spaces in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Kristi Fleetwood and I are organizing a session at NeMLA 2020. Below is the CFP for our session. NeMLA’s 51st…
Keep readingRevising Syllabi and Assignments: Picture Books
It’s the end of the semester, and I’m waiting for final papers to come in so I can do some…
Keep readingTextual and Emotional Complexities for a (formerly-Orthodox) Jewish Medievalist
This past weekend, I attended and participated in the wonder that is ICMS Kalamazoo. Thousands of medievalists descended on the…
Keep readingUsing PowerPoint Projects to Teach Essay Skills
When I teach literature, my focus is on enabling students to make strong arguments about the literature and writing strong…
Keep readingGrief and Glory: Use of Hebrew Crusades Chronicles and Piyuttim to Deter Adolescent Conversion
Way back in 2015, what feels like a lifetime ago, I wrote a seminar paper titled “Affective Use of First…
Keep readingEducators’ Praise as Evidence of Their Ideologies
It stands to reason that the traits praised by educators are the ones they see as the goal of education.
My own report cards from elementary school provide an interesting window into this question.
Keep readingAnnouncing: The Bais Yaakov Project!
I am overjoyed to announce that I am part of a brand-new project, The Bais Yaakov Project. The website is still…
Keep readingComics as a Tool for Summarizing and Understanding Essays
Sherman Alexie’s essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” includes a paragraph about paragraphs: I still remember…
Keep readingSyllabus Creation: A Nightmare Within a Dream
When I was offered a course on Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature at Lehman College for the fall semester, I…
Keep readingRelease and Relief on the First Day of Class
Yesterday was the first day of class for my two composition sections at College of Staten Island. Both sections meet…
Keep readingA Little Organization Goes a Long Way
I recently helped a friend who was struggling in her undergraduate classes. Her writing is excellent; she’s brilliant. But her…
Keep readingSetting the Bar Low: Teaching Students to Draft
As the summer begins to wind down for me (what, it just started? ah well, it’s almost over too), I’m…
Keep readingCall for Papers: Kalamazoo 2019
I’m organizing a panel at the 2019 International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo! I’m super-excited about this. I’ve shared…
Keep readingLiterary Hindsight: Teaching Medieval Love and Violence
At a Kalamazoo ICMS roundtable titled “Teaching Violence and Trauma in the Premodern Classroom (A Roundtable),” the question arose: How…
Keep readingStudent-Teaching
One of the great things about engaging as a student in the very academic endeavor I teach is that one…
Keep readingRace and Religion in The King of Tars: An Undergraduate Lesson
This is a pretty cut-and-dry account of a lesson I planned and how it went. I’m sharing because 1) I’m…
Keep readingI'm Published!
This post isn’t going to say much – I just finally got my copy of the book in which my…
Keep readingNarrow vs. Broad Writing Prompts [or] Full-Class vs. Individual Writing Instruction
In my first few semesters of teaching Freshman Composition, I wanted to assign papers that weren’t just boring, fill-in-the-requirements topics.…
Keep readingShakespeare Shenanigans
Last semester when I taught Twelfth Night, I led my students in creating a “relationship map” on the board. We delighted …
Keep readingPacing in a Literature Class: A Bit of Luck
My class is usually really lively and loud. We dive into texts and argue about interpretations, and I allow (and…
Keep readingFighting the Past: Medieval Dragons in Children’s and YA Literature
I presented this paper at the Pearl Kibre Medieval Society’s conference on “Pre-Modernisms” at the CUNY Graduate Center in October…
Keep readingForced Standpoint as Pedagogical Tool
The dissertation I’m working on now examines medieval literary texts for methods of education, in an attempt to define various…
Keep readingBeing Able to Talk First
More than the content of the texts the students read, the goal of a literature class is to allow students…
Keep readingTiny Tweaks, Powerful Payoffs
I know that one of my great teaching weaknesses is my tendency to historicize heavily, sometimes at the expense of…
Keep readingLullabies
My mother used to sing us to sleep with a wordless lullaby. We called it “ay-lee-loo-lee,” because those were the…
Keep readingLittle Big Girl: Feminism & Adolescence in "Little Red Riding Hood" Song
Syllabus prep led me to two versions of the song “Little Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs,…
Keep readingConvergence of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic in a Medieval Hebrew-Italian Arthurian Romance
This is a revised version of the paper I presented at MLA 2016. It was part of a panel titled…
Keep reading“Minstrels get about and so do students”: The Role of Emotional Attachment and Historical Accuracy in the Impact of Young Adult Fiction
This is a revised version of a paper I delivered at the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo.…
Keep readingOf Ghosts and Inferi: "Second Generation Memory" and Orthodox Children's Holocaust Literature
[This was written as an assignment for the class “Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Reflections on Theory and Method” with…
Keep readingLook, Mom, I'm a Mom!
The process of Alyce’s transformation in The Midwife’s Apprentice from the scared Beetle to the strong and independent girl she is at…
Keep readingThinking and Feeling
Earlier this semester, I read Patricia Ingham’s article on the “Pleasures of Arthur,” arguing that the attitude of derision to…
Keep readingRemember Me: Memorializing Complex Events on Tombstones in Malory
As I read the section in Morte Darthur titled “The Poisoned Apple” in Book VII, The Book of Sir Launcelot…
Keep readingHuman Agency and Responsibility in Malory's "Balin or the Knight with the Two Swords"
The story of Balin in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is littered with moments when Balin seems to watch in horror as events…
Keep readingMalory's Merlin: Shadows of the Druids in Arthur's Christian Court
(I am just beginning to read Malory now but want to write as I read, and not only when I…
Keep readingLove and Sex: Synonymous in YA Literature?
My previous post “Can Sex Be Just Sex? Pleasure and Trauma in YA” was a result of my frustration that when…
Keep readingMy Evil Twin and Me: When the Doppelganger is the Better One
The evil twin as a trope in literature is fairly straightforward: A character is extremely virtuous and good, but a…
Keep readingTree of Knowledge: Language, Voice, and Differance
Melinda’s focused and determined attempt to create a perfect tree in art class throughout Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak is obviously…
Keep readingCan Sex Be Just Sex? Pleasure and Trauma in YA
Sex in Young Adult literature – always a contentious topic. Any discussion of trends in the development of YA will…
Keep readingOn Being and Essence (De Ente et Essentia)
As I worked on my final paper for this semester’s class on Animals and Ecology in the Middle Ages, I…
Keep readingWynnere and Wastoure
A comment in class yesterday got me thinking about something that’s been niggling at the back of my brain for…
Keep readingThe Consolation of Philosophy
Last week I read Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet, and I was euphoric for at least a few…
Keep readingMundus et Infans
I was browsing through my old reading lists recently, and I came across the title Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth…
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Dainy Bernstein 