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Conversations with Natasha Trethewey

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother informs each book, Trethewey's range of forms and subjects is wide. In compact sonnets, elegant villanelles, ballad stanzas, and free verse, she creates monuments to mixed-race children of colonial Mexico, African American soldiers from the Civil War, a beautiful prostitute in 1910 New Orleans, and domestic workers from the twentieth-century North and South. Because her white father and her black mother could not marry legally in Mississippi, Trethewey says she was "given" her subject matter as "the daughter of miscegenation." A sense of psychological exile is evident from her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), to the recent Thrall (2012). Biracial people of the Americas are a major focus of her poetry and her prose book Beyond Katrina, a meditation on family, community, and the natural environment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney. She emotionally acknowledges Rita Dove's large impact, and she boldly positions herself in the southern literary tradition of Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Commenting on "Pastoral," "South," and other poems, Trethewey guides readers to deeper perception and empathy.

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Positive Psychology in the Elementary School Classroom

Use the neuroscience of emotional learning to transform your teaching. How can the latest breakthroughs in the neuroscience of emotional learning transform the classroom? How can teachers use the principles and practices of positive psychology to ensure optimal 21st-century learning experiences for all children? Patty O’Grady answers those questions. Positive Psychology in the Elementary School Classroom presents the basics of positive psychology to educators and provides interactive resources to enrich teachers’ proficiency when using positive psychology in the classroom. O’Grady underlines the importance of teaching the whole child: encouraging social awareness and positive relationships, fostering self-motivation, and emphasizing social and emotional learning. Through the use of positive psychology in the classroom, children can learn to be more emotionally aware of their own and others’ feelings, use their strengths to engage academically and socially, pursue meaningful lives, and accomplish their personal goals. The book begins with Martin Seligman’s positive psychology principles, and continues into an overview of affective learning, including its philosophical and psychological roots, from finding the “golden mean” of emotional regulation to finding a child’s potencies and “golden self.” O’Grady connects the core concepts of educational neuroscience to the principles of positive psychology, explaining how feelings permeate the brain, affecting children’s thoughts and actions; how insular neurons make us feel empathy and help us learn by observation; and how the frontal cortex is the hall monitor of the brain. The book is full of practical examples and interactive resources that invite every educator to create a positive psychology classroom, where children can flourish and reach their full potential.