I'm excited about the upcoming school year. Not only do I have some new practices I plan to develop in my classes, but there are changes that my team is anticipating (or perhaps are apprehensive about). I plan to start a blog for my classes, on which they will respond to the class novels they're assigned; and, in class, I plan to teach units, or at least projects, based on those novels. This last part, especially, will be a significant change from my previous teaching because the themes will be related to a single historical fiction story and will come from a single author's perceptions over a long-term reading of a novel, rather than from several short stories written by several authors. In short, I hope to build relevance by basing our understanding of literature on an author's understanding about life. This quality, relevance, has always been my foundational principal as a teacher, but I have not always put this principal into practice. I have had good intentions i...