Mr. Fasano’s English Class

Please help support the work I do as a teacher and purchase a copy of this book of wonderful poems by Robert Frost. I selected and edited the poems and wrote the explanatory notes, and Coyote Canyon Press did a great job with their high production standards.
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Order from Barnes and Noble.
Order from Amazon [...]

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Coyote Canyon Press is publishing a book of Robert Frost’s early poetry, for which I did the editing, selected the poems, and wrote explanatory notes. The idea was a simple one: gather up the poems from Frost’s first three volumes and write notes for the poems that needed some sort of explanation. The title of [...]

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My students had to draw a creative map of the places in THE GREAT GATSBY. I gave them a worksheet with a list of what needed to be on their maps, and then told them to be creative. To my delight, many of them were. Here are some of the results.

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The Great Gatsby is possibly the most popular book American students will read during their entire high school career. I remember reading a survey in a newspaper a few years ago when about a thousand people were asked to list their favorite books from high school. The Great Gatsby was ranked number one, followed closely [...]

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The Irish pop group Divine Comedy recorded a song based on “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Here’s a snippet from the song. Give it a listen.

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Shelly Duvall talks with Dennis Christopher during the filming of Bernice Bobs Her Hair in Nov. 6, 1975.
The following is from the Vintage book The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The idea for “Bernice bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was [...]

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Here’s a great video of Simon & Garfunkel performing their version of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s most-anthologized poem, “Richard Cory.” I find it impossible to teach this masterpiece [...]

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This is the only known photograph of President Lincoln at his Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863. This photo wasn’t properly identified until 1952. In it Lincoln is seated and hatless, and to his right is his personal bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. Some historians think that it would be another three hours before Lincoln gave [...]

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by Emily Dickinson
I HEARD a fly buzz — when I died–
the stillness in the room
was like the stillness in the air —
between the heaves of storm —
The [...]

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