Teaching Trans*: Transparent as a Strategy in English Language Arts Classrooms

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how to incorporate a popular television series about being trans*gender into the secondary English Language Arts curriculum. The authors conduct a series of two-hour interviews with the creative and writing teams of the popular television show, Transparent, and examine how to incorporate this material in the English Language Arts classroom along with their combined 16 years of teaching experience. The paper discusses how to incorporate fuse writing assignments and literature activities with adolescents in order to educate young adults about the experiences of being trans*gender as well transform teaching practices as they relate to trans* students. As the population of trans*gender students continues to increase, the implications for this research cannot be overstated. The paper concludes with recommendations for how ELA teachers can address issues of gender and sexuality in their secondary classrooms

Art and Design: Teaching Siddhartha in a Secondary Urban High School

This paper describes, in detail, the process I followed to plan a unit on Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha. The primary argument of this paper is that inner-city, undereducated students can understand and relate to culturally disparate literary works when teachers plan backwards, develop art projects, and design thematically-based writing assignments. This article has been divided into three sections: a summary of the novel, a brief review of professional theories and research on teaching literature to secondary students, and an in-depth look at the student assignments

Superfluid Inhomogeneity and Microwave Absorption in Model High-T_c Superconductors

We investigate the microwave absorption arising from inhomogeneity in the superfluid density of a model high-T_c superconductor. Such inhomogeneities may arise from a wide variety of sources, including quenched random disorder and static charge density waves such as stripes. We show that both mechanisms will inevitably produce additional absorption at finite frequencies. We present simple model calculations for this extra absorption, and discuss applications to other transport properties in high-T_c materials. Finally, we discuss the connection of these predictions to recent measurements by Corson et al. of absorption by the high-temperature superconductor BSCCO in the THz frequency regime.Comment: Presented at ETOPIM-6; latex file requires espcrc2.st