class dismissed

Welcome to Bray’s House! (Which is what I used to call my classroom, until I came to occupy the room already named for the women who had one of the most significant impacts on me as a teacher, Ruth Mosby Green.)

The inaugural purpose of this page is to give a few students of mine, who are in my regular sophomore English class, the opportunity to earn credit for Honors English. I am experimenting with the efficiency of posting recordings of my Honors class here for those students to watch on a daily basis. At this point, this seems easier than setting up an account with iTunes or sending them to Blip.tv to search for the most recent lesson. We’ll see…

Now Showing: HE2 (12/8-08) For the past week they have been designing (and completing) activities, as if they were teachers, that solicit progressively higher order thinking, as based on bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive processes. The initiative demonstrated the first 2 minutes of this video excited me!

Archives:
HE2 (11/19/08) Introduction of the KNOWLEDGE portion of the semester project. Knowing that students often become overwhelmed looking at a project in totality, i’m feeding them the elephant one bite at a time.
HE2 (11/13/08) Discussion of “The First Seven Years” from the collection “Hearts that Love” from the sophomore literature text.
HE2 (10/23/08) This was supposed to be a reprise of the previous days sermon, which was “Don’t let others (not even adults)–well-meaning though they may be–rob you of the opportunity to learn.” I got started down a different path with this class (we determined the cost of each of the celebrations we outlined in our Common Good Covenant) and ended up not delivering it.
HE2 (10/22/08) the 4 purposes of writing; the 3 parts of a good argument.
HE2 (10/20/08) Writing introductions and theses for exposition and persuasion.

For your amusement, here are a few Brayisms one is apt overhear walking by my classroom…

    There is no success outside of relationship.
    There is no learning without struggle. (cf. Frederick Douglass)
    Two dim bulbs do not a well lit room make. Be the brighter bulb.
    Sophomores [which means "wise fool,"] rise above your name!
    Be not deceived, Bray is not mocked: what you sow, you shall reap.
    Everything costs something–good or bad.
    Mediocrity cannot be quarantined; when allowed to persist, it eventually invades every aspect of our lives, like it or not. (cf. Amadeus)
    It’s easy to be a cynic.  It takes no creativity, just the willingness to tear down what someone else is trying to accomplish.
    We are who we practice to be.

And a few commonly heard quotes…

    “You live; you learn; you do better.” ~Leslie Bray
    “Achievement without contribution is without significance.” ~The Emperors Club
    “We are here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.” ~Crimson Tide
    “This is [not a democracy: it's] a Brayocracy!” ~Anonymous Student
    “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” ~ James Baldwin
    “We learned our times tables without understanding their grand principle, simply because we had the capacity and no alternative.” ~Maya Angelou
    “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still all in all, it takes it’s shape from de shore it meets, and is different with every shore.” ~Zora Neale Hurston
    “Excuses are the worthless rags with which we mend our garments of failure.” ~Sylvia Barnes