The National Humanities center presents this collection of essays by leading scholars on the topic ŇFreedomŐs Story: Teaching African American Literature and HistoryÓ. Topics include the affect of slavery on families, slave resistance, how to read slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, reconstruction, segregation, pigmentocracy, protest poetry, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.

This course expands skills in speaking, reading, listening, and writing. Students develop analytic and interpretative skills through the reading of a full-length drama as well as short prose and poetry (Biermann, Brecht, DĚ_rrenmatt, Tawada and others) and through media selections on contemporary issues in German-speaking cultures. Coursework includes discussions and compositions based on these texts, and review of grammar and development of vocabulary-building strategies. It is recommended for students with two years of high school German.

This showcase of digital broadsides is devoted to nature poets and their work. Imagine Nature explores the convergence of poetry, graphic arts, and the technology of the Internet. Along with the text of the poem, some broadsides includes an audio reading (often by the author), photographs or original artwork, related nature sounds, or videos. The featured works include: "The Snakes of September" by Stanley Kunitz| "Sleeping In the Forest" by Mary Oliver| "St. Francis and the Sow" by Galway Kinnell| "For Luis" by Michael McClure| "The Butterfly Obtains" by Emily Dickinson| "Little Cosmic Dust Poem" by John Haines|"Sitting by a Swamp" by David Wagoner.

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of three broad topics concerning music in relation to time.Music as Architecture: the creation of musical shapes in time;Music as Memory: how musical understanding depends upon memory and reminiscence, with attention to analysis of musical structures; andTime as the Substance of Music: how different disciplines such as philosophy and neuroscience view the temporal dimension of musical processes and/or performances.Classroom discussion of these topics is complemented by three weekend concerts with pre-concert forums, jointly presented by the Boston Chamber Music Society (BCMS) and MIT Music & Theater Arts.

Many students begin to learn about metaphors well before entering high school. This lesson assumes that students will have a basic understanding of what metaphors are; however it is designed to help students begin to engage with metaphors on a deeper and more abstract level. The lesson will begin with a poem containing metaphors accessible at all levels, and with each poem the lesson will progress in difficulty, so that teachers will find material to suit their classes at all skill levels.

See an animated version of Emily Dickinson's poem I Started Early Took my Dog. This video segment from Poetry Everywhere uses animation to illustrate Dickinson's poem about the sea.

Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.

A collection of resources supporting an author study of Jacqueline Woodson.  It includes interviews, lesson plans, book trailers, book readings and multiple TeachingBooks.net created meet-the-author videos.  It can be used for student research during an author study or as a resource for educators creating a lesson on the author or one of her works.

"This course covers Japanese: The Spoken Language lessons 17 through 22. It will further develop the four basic skills, speaking, listening, reading and writing, that students have acquired through Japanese I, II and III courses, with emphasis on oral communication skills in various practical situations. Students will learn approximately 100 Kanji characters in this course. Sessions in English cover grammar explanation, socio-cultural information and other important issues for using the language, while Japanese lessons focus on the actual use of the language, integrating students' prior knowledge with newly learned patterns, and communicating within the frame given in the class."

Explore the power of memory, irony, and ordinary objects. In this video segment from Poetry Everywhere, Billy Collins reads his humorous poem, The Lanyard, about a childhood gift he made for his mother.

In this lesson, students use blogs to hold discussions about the effect of the factors of culture, history, and environment on Latino poetry.

Leyendas y arquetipos del Romanticismo español is an introduction to nineteenth-century Spanish literature with a thematic focus on legends and archetypes. It presents Romanticism in the context of nineteenth-century literary and social movements. It is designed as a first anthology for intermediate Spanish students at American universities. Although brief, it includes poetry, drama in verse and short story. The works have been selected for their literary interest and the social importance of their themes. They are all by canonical authors.
The Prologue and introductions to the authors and texts often utilize circumlocution to facilitate comprehension, and include concrete examples of the concepts presented. The author biographies are brief and should not be used as study materials, but rather as starting points for students’ own exploration. Many students prefer following their own interests when researching author biographies, and the internet makes accessible a plethora of bibliographic resources, such as the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the Centro Virtual Cervantes of the Cervantes Institute, or the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Spanish National Library. Student participation in the selection of topics and sources emphasizes the investigative process and leads to richer class discussions.

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom.

Emmy award-winning poet, Lucille Clifton, introduces and reads her poem, 'Turning,' about trying to be your own person and taking responsibility for your life.

In 1667, John Milton published what he intended both as the crowning achievement of a poetic career and a justification of God's ways to man: an epic poem which retold and reimagined the Biblical story of creation, temptation, and original sin. Even in a hostile political climate, Paradise Lost was almost immediately recognized as a classic, and one fate of a classic is to be rewritten, both by admirers and by antagonists. In this seminar, we will read Paradise Lost alongside works of 20th century fantasy and science fiction which rethink both Milton's text and its source.

What does the Genesis story of creation and temptation tell us about gender, about heterosexuality, and about the origins of evil? What is the nature of God, and how can we account for that nature in a cosmos where evil exists? When is rebellion justified, and when is authority legitimate? These are some of the key questions that engaged the poet John Milton, and that continue to engage readers of his work.

Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.

Archeology offers the most tangible evidence of earlier civilizations. Although archeology has already provided invaluable information pertaining to the life styles and skills of the peoples from this region of West Africa, the archaeological record is still incomplete. The figurative sculptures featured in this resource furnish one part of the historical puzzle of this region. These handsome terracotta sculptures are from the Inland Niger Delta region near Djenne (pronounced JEH-nay; also spelled Jenne), one of several important trading cities that grew and developed during the Mali Empire.

Consideration of some substantial twentieth-century poetic voices. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. This course considers some of the substantial early twentieth-century poetic voices in America. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. We'll read the major poems by the most important poets in English in the 20th century, emphazinig especially the period between post-WWI disillusionment and early WW II internationalism (ca. 1918-1940). Our special focus this term will be how the concept of "the Image" evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century, early 20th century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin films. We'll read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet-as-language-priest, aesthetic-experience-as-displaced-religious impulse, to poetry as faith, ritual, and form.

This video segment from A Walk Through Harlem features the poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes.