Becky Boer

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July 2018

Reviews

Stay With Me

by Ayobami Adebayo Yejide is a woman who cannot get pregnant, so her husband, Akin, takes a second wife to bear his children. And then absolutely nothing happens the way you expect it to. Adebayo’s writing is elegant and mature, but not stilted or formal. She flows back and forth between Yejide and Akin’s points of view effortlessly, and you can’t help but want the best for these realistic, messy, sometimes not-so-great people. One of the things that really stuck with me  ...

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Reviews

The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin This book was fantastic. It started off rather slowly, in my opinion, and it took me a while to really get into it, but as soon as I got past the prologue, I was hooked. So many questions arise as you’re reading. Well, actually, there were two that really kept nagging at me. First, are all the siblings going to die on their supposed death day? I loved that the book was structured into four parts, one for each sibling, so that you had to wait until the very end of  ...

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Books

An Homage to Dickens

It’s only been recently that I’ve read anything by Charles Dickens. I started with Great Expectations. I thought it was clever and funny, and full of amusing, interesting characters. Then I read A Tale of Two Cities, and fell completely in love with it. I love the history, the love triangle, the relationship between Lucie and Dr. Manette, and most of all, I just love Dickens and his way with words. So much so that I got it tattooed on myself forever. “And when you see your own  ...

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Teaching

My Classroom Non-Negotiables

In my last blog entry, I considered ways that my beliefs have changed since I started teaching back in 2004. There are a lot. And of course, that’s a good thing. If there ever comes a point in my career when I stop learning, growing, and changing, I need to leave the classroom. One of the things that seems particularly striking to me now is how much my beliefs have changed regarding lesson plans. During my student teaching, the second grade team that I worked with used a gridded  ...

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