Learning Pods
This is an exciting possibility for me because it would allow me to do some real teaching. The idea is to group together a number of students (probably 3-10) who share a common interest or perhaps a common desire to work on specific skills. The group would then meet at prearranged meeting times (once a week? once every two weeks?) and a particular location (someone’s back patio?). I imagine learning pods mostly likely occurring in the summer, only because students would be too busy with their regular classes during the school year. The possibilities for topics/skills covered could stretch in a number of directions. Some examples:
- A group of five students transitioning from 8th to 9th grade, all of whom are interested in preparing themselves for high school level writing expectations.
- A group of six students in the summer before their junior year who are a little nervous about moving into AP English.
- A group of rising seniors who want to workshop potential college essay topics.
- A group of graduated seniors who want to engage in a high-level, specialized mini-course on a particular topic or author.
- A group of adults who want to engage in a high level, specialized mini-course on a particular topic or author (a more serious-minded book club?)
Regarding options, here are some areas of expertise for me:
- Writing for high school (general skills)
- Preparing to take the AP Language and Composition class
- The novels of Cormac McCarthy
- Literature and the American West
- American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman)
- The novels of Philip Roth
- American Realism
- Contemporary African American fiction
- Deep studies into single novels. Examples (ones I have taught most recently): The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger), Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger), The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates), All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy), The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer), The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead), The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (Heidi Durrow)
Pricing: We would negotiate this at the outset, and it would depend on the number of people in the pod, the topic under study, the number and duration of the meetings, the type of writing (if any) that would come out of the classes. I can imagine a wide range of possibilities, from meeting once a week to work on expository essays (high school students) to meeting three times in a summer to discuss the novels of J. D. Salinger (adults?).
Contact: [email protected]
