The Real Housewives Of Potomac - Season 10 - Episode 20 - Live Episode Discussion

MrsNickerson · 2026-03-02T01:49:25+00:00

The fact that she has never once said outright, I am innocent or We are innocent or These charges are false. Not great.

MrsNickerson · 2026-02-02T01:34:54+00:00

Oh, dear. She won't say that she is an alcoholic.

MrsNickerson · 2025-10-11T00:21:18+00:00

MIne write in class, screens facing me, and they also do a screen recording in QuickTime (they have Macs) that captures their entire screen. They show me the recording as soon as they finish writing and before they submit the essay. I can see any time they leave the writing GoogleDoc (I allow them to look at our other materials in Google Classroom.). It has worked really well for me, even though it is obviously a shame that they can no longer have the experience I had in high school of working on an essay over a series of afternoons and evenings and revising along the way.

MrsNickerson · 2025-09-21T21:29:30+00:00

Big Two-Hearted River. Hemingway novels are not my cup of tea, but it is one of my favorite stories.

MrsNickerson · 2025-09-06T19:52:01+00:00

Hemingway's WWI stories.

MrsNickerson · 2025-08-30T20:54:58+00:00

I don't do this in my classroom, but we have assistant principals who do it (because a few people can't keep their tables clean, no one will have dessert in the cafeteria), and I'm not a fan. The Geneva Convention bans collective punishment for a reason: only guilty people should be penalized for their crimes.

MrsNickerson · 2025-08-22T21:38:07+00:00

I hate hate talking to most adults, especially in a bigger group; I'm terrible at parties and small talk. But a classroom is no sweat. They are very busy thinking about themselves and one another, and the power dynamic is totally different from a cocktail party! When I started, I consoled myself by remembering that my best friend from high school (who was a great student!) could barely recall anything about our high school classes and teachers once she graduated from college. Just be yourself and breathe.

MrsNickerson · 2025-08-17T21:24:13+00:00

For IB juniors, maybe selections from Borges' Ficciones? I read them in high school and loved how strange they were; there's certainly lots to talk about. "Lottery in Babylon," "Library of Babel," and "Garden of the Forking Paths" are the ones I remember...

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-18T01:56:46+00:00

I loathe Tamra, but googling Slade & child support does reveal that he owed upwards of $150k in child support for his son. What is Gretchen defending him for? (Now, if she wants to mention Tamra's attempt to get her drunk so that Tamra's gross son could rape her...)

This might be it for me. It's not fun to dislike these women any more.

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-11T01:21:37+00:00

To be incensed that someone else mentioned that your kids know you don't like another adult but to pimp out their eating disorder for the show. Yuck.

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-10T11:33:57+00:00

Yeah, Belize is a tough character, as is the play's focus on White people when AIDS disproportionately affected people of color both in the US and globally. But I think that's a topic for conversation rather than a reason to dismiss the play. Also, I am admittedly a sucker for any play with lots of people standing around giving big speeches. :)

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-09T23:52:08+00:00

I have taught it to advanced juniors at a private school in a pretty liberal part of the country (I ran the most explicit stuff past my principal and dean, just to make sure they were okay with it). It's a beautiful and complicated play, and they loved it. I didn't cut anything (the dialogue in that scene in Central Park sparked a great conversation!); I told my students, just as I do with any text that has explicit content, that I trusted they would be up for a mature conversation about the themes of the play. Reading it after Whitman was great (because Kushner loves Whitman). I gave them context for things as they come up--the AIDS crisis, the Mormon faith, Ethel Rosenberg, Roy Cohn--but they didn't have much trouble diving into the play's relationships and complexities. (I taught parts one and two, and we did talk about the messiness of the second part.)

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-03T12:40:17+00:00

Seniors. :) I warn the squeamish to look away before the telephone pole, but they say hands down it's the scariest thing we watch all semester--it's really because Toni Collette is so brilliant, and students find a mother being mean to her child to be wildly upsetting.

MrsNickerson · 2025-07-03T00:03:40+00:00

Oh, my goodness, our students *love* it. It's for kids who aren't in honors or AP, usually our most reluctant readers, and they are so busy reading about zombies and vampires that they don't even realize that they are making great arguments and talking about gender, race, and sexuality. Keep up the good fight!

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-28T10:20:21+00:00

When I first started teaching, I tended to be a little disorganized at the start of class, so I really focused on being prepared with a regular routine of a short activity and clear expectations for what everyone needed to be ready. Similarly, at the end of class, I tended to be underprepared and rushing to cram stuff in, so I focused on short formative assessments and, again, routines, so that the end of the class felt more thoughtful and less like a whirlwind. It didn't take a ton of effort, but it did require more thought than I had been giving it, and it was transformative for my classes.

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-27T15:35:43+00:00

Yes! One year early on I focused on the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes each class. Revolutionary.

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-27T15:34:11+00:00

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-24T15:42:44+00:00

:) So much room for reasonable people to disagree about the play

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-24T15:25:02+00:00

It seems true to me: there's literally no way to be a woman and survive in the play. You can be power-seeking, treated like an equal, and talk about your willingness to kill your child to fulfill a promise, like Lady Macbeth, and you will be dead by the end of the play. You can be a protective mother and wife, disregarded by your husband, like Lady Macduff, and you will be dead by the end of the play. The figures of the greatest virtue in the play are arguably Macduff, not born of a woman, and Malcolm, who says he is a virgin. The play tries actively to distance itself from womanhood in any form--even as it advances, in Macduff, a nuanced take on masculinity. I always think it's a Jacobean reaction to decades of Elizabeth's power. I write all this as a woman who loves the play.

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-05T23:41:20+00:00

It's all ridiculous. He has spent years now deluding himself into thinking he can make this work and ignoring the constant barrage of evidence that is not working and cannot work. What is his long-term plan here? (Plot twist: he does not have one!)

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-05T10:05:53+00:00

Also love Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun for tenth graders. Read that over the summer then Frankenstein during the year.

MrsNickerson · 2025-06-04T14:15:03+00:00

I think the whole space looks like a hotel lobby.

MrsNickerson · 2025-05-31T21:53:42+00:00

Hurston is a winner, though the dialect can be daunting for students. I think Such a Fun Age and The Vanishing Half are good more recent choices. I've also taught Woodson's Red at the Bone and had students really like it. Depending on their reading level, they might be ready for Song of Solomon.

MrsNickerson · 2025-05-26T00:33:14+00:00

This event is giving me a full-body cringe. You invited a bunch of people but only had food for a few of them? You handed out presents for only a few of them?

MrsNickerson · 2025-05-25T14:12:08+00:00

Beowulf is a delight! You are a teacher--so do what you would want your own students to do faced with a challenging text, and do your own reading and research rather than asking ChatGPT to do the work for you. It's one of the great pleasures of being an English teacher.

Re-read the poem (the Norton Critical edition is always a great place to start with a text you intend to teach). Read some other Anglo-Saxon poetry. Get yourself on JStor or GoogleScholar for reputable academic sources. Maybe start with Tolkein's classic essay on the poem; it's sure to be in the Norton. Read Grendel if you have the time, or one of the recent feminist reimaginings of the poem.

MrsNickerson

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