Literature and Film

October 24, 2018
Currently, ‘Literature and Film’ is one of the most popular ‘suggested options’ under Part 4: Options (a bit confusing, to say the least, though it all shakes out as ‘Free Choice’, really). There are a lot of great ideas coming from...

Humor and Irony, Elusive Terms

October 17, 2018
In my own classroom, we often struggle with clarifying what constitutes humor in writing, how it is to be handled critically and how to write successfully about it. One (of many) complementary problems is being sure what we mean by irony.   These terms have long been...

The Writer, or the Speaker, the Voice, the Persona?

September 3, 2018
Over the years, all of us have struggled with the vexed question of ‘who is speaking’ in a poem or in a first person narrative, or in an autobiographical essay.  And of course it troubles our students as they read literature, often especially with poetry. ...

Advice for Successful Individual Oral Commentaries

August 24, 2018
At some point, sooner or later, whether you are a HL or SL student, you’ll see that IOC coming toward you.  You’ll be thinking such things as ‘how am I going to get through this?’ or ‘what can I do to prepare?’  Your teachers will...

If You’re Teaching Writing about Africa. . .

August 3, 2018
. . .you might find this wry commentary by Binyavanga Wainaina interesting.  This piece was published in 2009 and maybe we–writers and readers–are well beyond this kind of thinking.  And maybe not. I have found the essay useful in class to remind all of us how easy it...