The links below will navigate you around this school website and to my google calendar.
Embedded Files
Voice Mail: 303-982-2614 Email: bhaller@jeffco.k12.co.us , or through Gmail in google classroom. I will return messages within 24 hours during my work/building hours, Monday through Friday. I am not available after work/building hours or on weekends.
My usual building hours: 7:45 am to 3:30 or 4:00 pm.
Please, please use the calendar button above or the posted calendar below to stay aware of what we did, learned, assigned, or earned points for in class each day. I fill it out at the end of each day, to reflect what truly happened in class. Clicking on a few/several adjacent days will reveal our pace, and any big assignments still a ways out and which are therefore reemphasized only on occasional dates.
My education: K-12 in Fairfax Co, VA, grad '85; AA at Red Rocks, '87; BA (English) and Teaching Cred at Metro, '91; MA (English Lit) at UCD, '02; D'Evelyn teacher since March '96
My interests beyond my love of literature and writing: backyard astronomy, researching/collecting/comparing recordings of classical music (like my dozen or so full cycles of Beethoven's piano sonatas), watching minor league ball at the stadium, walking and biking with Mrs. Haller in our Park Hill neighborhood, history (my college minor), art of all eras and cultures, film, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, documentaries like Ken Burns' Civil War and Country Music, and rock/popular music from Buddy Holly to Beach House.
Non-curricular reading I enjoy: Tang Dynasty poetry, Derek Walcott, American history (McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, for example), Anne Stevenson, encyclopedic resources like the Oxford Companion series or The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, car magazines (I get 4, I think), books about artists or art history (go Janet Fish! go Book of Kells!), and The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. And a good atlas.
Best thing that ever happened to me at a staff meeting: I first saw the future Mrs. Haller, August of '96.
Calendar: All classes, daily and make-up
Calendar: All classes, daily and make-up
From p.9 of the D'Evelyn Program Narrative, the Founders' marvelous description of the process and benefits of written literary analysis as they envisioned it for D'Evelyn students:
To adequately measure students’ growth in the recognition and understanding of literary elements (e.g. structure, technique, and timeless themes of human emotions and endeavors), assessments will be primarily essay. We emphasize essay questions, because they require thorough knowledge of the piece(s) studied, and they allow students to support their observations, interpretations, and evaluations by use of citation and logical argument. The essay-based exercise requires the student to really know, analyze, and interpret the material, in contrast to simply recognizing the material as in multiple-choice testing. It also fosters the students’ mastery of writing skills by the practice of writing on subjects of established and recognized value. Further, this type of exercise requires clarification of ideas and the ability to identify appropriately material necessary to support well-founded interpretations and/or positions.2
(Their note "2" refers us to page 142 in Jacques Barzun's Begin Here, a seminal text for our school's philosophy.)
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