The literature circles. It was a cool strategy, but I don’t feel like I got as much out of it as I thought I would. I appreciate that we looked at ne classic text in addition to some more contemporary alternatives, but I felt like there was something missing. I felt like the goal in the end was to summarize the books and their usefulness and not enough emphasis was put on the teaching of the texts. I would of rather read the texts, and present to the class the activities we would do if we taught it. Instead of a reading log, we could of created a teaching log, with resources and ideas for teaching the books. Sort of like a teaching plan, but more individual. (Upon editing this I realized that I may be biased. In truth, I am just more of an individual worker, and I find it frusterating to complete group projects sometimes.) |
We are nearing the end of this CnI class which means a) there is not enough hours in the day to do everything I want, and b) did I mention there is a lot to do? So excuse the brevity of this last post, but I still wanted to comment on the class as a whole. Bring on two stars and a wish!
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Unit planning, when there are actual students on the receiving end of it, is a lot harder than I thought it would be. For many reasons I think. First of all, I gave myself a challenge. I normally work exclusively with children under the age of 10. My Mom thinks I’m some sort of child whisperer. I’ve had days babysitting where a trip to the park with two kids ends up being me leading a group of 5-8 year olds as we storm the “castle” (i.e. the slide) for “treasure” (i.e. a broken car, some sticks, and a pile of leaves). However, now I am teaching 60 some 15-16 year olds. Somehow, I don’t think I will be storming any castles with them.
Secondly, I’m teaching a play I had never read before this week, The Merchant of Venice. It’s a good play, and I am excited to teach some Shakespeare, but I am struggling to come up with a relevant theme. What the heck to 15 and 16 year olds like?! I know, I know, I was in grade 10 not that long ago, but I was a bit of an odd nut, still am probably. So right now I have a pile of resources, a kitchen wall plastered with poster paper, and a ceiling, which I starred at for about 90 minutes on Wednesday. Somehow, brilliance did not come out of the off white speckles. That being said, there is a very sad watermark on my ceiling, and I discovered, that if you look at it a certain way, it makes a face. Who knew? I’m rambling, but I think you get a sense of my head space at this point. It’s almost like I have too many ideas, and too much that I want to do with my students. It is difficult to pin down a theme that will inspire both myself and my students. I just keep on flipping through books and waiting for brilliance, but it is hard to find at this point. I have the pleasure of teaching Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to grade tens in my practicum. I had never read the play before, but I liked my first reading of it. The play has a beautiful 2005 adaptation with Al Pacino as Shylock, and I would love to share this film with my students. Above is a clip from the movie, which shows one of Shylock's famous soliloquies from the play (Act 3:1). It's brilliantly done, but the director, Machael Radford, chose to stage this scene outside of a brothel. Which means...you guessed it, boobs. Though in the background, and of little importance, nudity is not something one is usually eager to bring into the classroom. Normally, I would go against censoring anything from my students, but I am dealing with a class that is mostly grade 10 boys. They aren't going to pay much attention to the quality dialogue in the first viewing.
But perhaps I'm underestimating them. It is still something I would like to address with my TA before using, but I still think it might be valuable for my students to view. Shylock is a very interesting character, and I would like to explore his different aspects with my students.
Naturally, when I discovered I would be guiding grade 10's in their first foray through Shakespeare, I immediately thought back to those classes with Ullyot. What he is doing makes sense. Students in the 21st century develop their digital literacy at the same time, if not before, they are English literate. Why not use digital tools to examine traditional texts?
Critics of the digital age often morn the loss of long attention spans, but I think this is one of the beauties of online publishing. An author must be brief if they wish to hold their audience's attention, and thus each word is chosen with care and consideration. Twitter is the perfect example of this careful berevity. In Ullyot's class we were required to submit a certain number of tweets under a common hashtag. We could pose questions, take pictures of our text annotations, or generally share any links or information we had while reading. It helped to develop a reading community outside of the classroom. This activity is something I would love to try with my grade tens during practicum, but I have some reservations about it as well. First of all, should I grade it? It gives me some great formative feedback about my students, and I want them to participate, but how do I motivate them to do so, and to think critically without a grade. I'm hoping the activity will be engaging enough that this is not something I have to worry about. Secondly, twitter is a social media platform that I cannot necessarily control. I want to be sure that students aren't abusing the community we are creating. And lastly, like everything in my planning. I'm not sure that students will actually enjoy the activity. I want to do something that will make reading the play memorable and enjoyable, but I also want to ensure that I am giving them the best learning opportunities possible. At this point, we've tried three methods of unit planning in class and I would like to share my opinion on each: Planning From Texts * * * 3/5 Stars!This type of planning is the one I anticipate doing the most in my teaching career. I figure each school will have different access to resources, and I will have to work with whatever is available. I do not mind planning a unit in this manner, but I don't love it either. Once I read the book, it is easy to think of themes and activities I could do in conjunction with the text. However, I feel like the students are lost in this type of planning. The nature of this planning means that all the students will probably read the same book. and the text may not align with their interests. In which case, it can be difficult to hook them. If students don't feel a connextion with the themes of the text, they will be unwilling to learn more about them. Planning From Activities * * * * 4/5 Stars!This was my favorite method of planning. If I have a skill or style I want to teach the students it is easy to create a plan that is exciting and supplies some choice for the student in what they want to do. In a way, it is a perfect UBD model, because you begin with the end product in mind. For my group, we had a very specific goal we wanted to achieve, and that is to teach script writing. The end product for students would be their own script, correctly formatted, and in a style that works for them. The resources and lessons taught on this subject all apply to the end goal, and because there is choice, I think it is easy to gain the interests of students. Planning From Curriculum * * 2/5 Stars :(This was my least favorite method of planning. Because the English curriculum is so open and broad it is difficult to come up with a specific unit based on the objectives. What I found myself doing is brainstorming a list of activities that would align with a certain objective, and then picking one of those activities and running with it. Essentially I reverted back to the second method. I could still plan from this method id I had to, but it certainly does not stimulate my creativity like the other two methods.
I decided to record information on this weeks readings through a mind map. I'm trying to acclimatize myself to mind maps, becuase they are not my favorite means of information organization. However, I see how they might be useful to my students. My problem is that I have yet to find a program I like. I made this one using mind meister, but the problem is that you have to pay for the program to share it effectively. A link to the map might be useful in this case but alas I can only give pictures and document summaries. I enjoyed the book talks today, but it was a lot of information to absorb at once. I wish we had more time to really talk about the books in a less formal manner. There was a lot of information we had to communicate in a short about of time, which limited the style of the presentations, and most of them were fairly didactic at the expense of activity and movement. If I were to do it again (with a bit less requirements to fulfill), I would present a sales pitch. I would speak to the audience as if I was introducing the books to my students for the first time. I wouldn't bother with so much information on the author, or reviews, but I would get them hooked on the story itself. Do a quick predication activity perhaps, and hype them up for their summative assessment so they knew the end goal. I felt today that we were able to really connect with the books. Though I was intrigued by some of the things said, I didn't leave thinking "I MUST READ THAT!" which is what I want my students to think when they leave the class. I felt like we were unsuccessful in really passing our passion for these texts on to our classmates. Take Carrie Hope Fletcher as an example. Carrie has the ability to pass her positivity, excitement and passion on to her viewers. In this particular video she is simply singing about how boys in books are better, a humorous and silly topic, but I think she really passes her love of reading to her audience. In other videos she tours her book shelves, gives reviews, and makes suggestions, but the entire time you can sense her genuine love for reading. That's what we need to pass to students. I don't like mornings. My Mom used to tease me because I didn't really communicate using words until about 9:30am. So last Thursday I tried an experiment. It was morning, I didn't really want to talk, so I wanted to see if I could go an entire class without talking and see if anyone noticed. I learned two things, 1) I cannot go more than an hour without voicing my opinions, and 2) there is a sense of invisibility when nobody acknowledges your silence. Perhaps one of those influences the other, but either way it was a bit of an eye opening experience for me.
I've never really understood why the "quiet kids" felt uncomfortable raising their hand. As my experiment proved, I am quite comfortable with it, and often feel compelled to contribute to class discussion. However, I think it is important that every student be given a voice in the classroom. I do not want any student in my class to be able to go an entire class without saying or contributing something to the conversation. There are lots of ways to facilitate this. Small group discussion is probably the easiest, but not necessarily the most effective. Even though there were two group discussions during my hour of silence, I managed to go silent through one (the other broke me when I disagreed with a point someone made, I couldn't help myself). My other group members could fill the silence, and nobody directly posed questions or comments to me. I felt very much replaceable. The group did not need me to be successful, it seemed that they would complete the task just as well without me, if not better, than they would with me. Sharing in pairs definitely forces both of the pair to share, though this could be potentially nerve racking for the student. Often think-pair-shares are done quickly, and there sometimes isn't enough time to gather thoughts before sharing. I can understand how a student with social anxiety might be uncomfortable sharing with a peer they do not know well. However, in this method they get immediate feedback from the other in the pair, who can validate and acknowledge whatever they have to say. A third way students can voice their opinions is through writing, such as exit slips or response journals. However, these can only be shared with the one person who reads them, and often this person is the teacher. If the teacher does not provide feedback, I do not think the student gets the same sense of validation for their thoughts and ideas as they would through a conversation. To be heard, you have to have an active and engaged listener, and this is not always achieved through writing. I think any way you tackle this issue, there is no 100% effective outcome, but that is not going to stop me trying to make my students feel heard. If you are not familiar with the youtube channel SoulPancake, you should be. They post a variety of videos that, in my opinion, show the very best of humanity. Some of my favorites series of theirs include The Flipside, Word on The Street, and of course, Kid President.
Kid President (AKA Robby) is a charismatic energetic kid with osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease which makes his bones extremely breakable. Despite his condition, he never lets his broken bones get him down. Him and his brother-in-law, Brad, started making videos for fun, often with uplifting and positive messages. Now they are on a mission to make the world more awesome by simply spreading happiness. I think this could potentially be a great resource to bring into the classroom. I think students often feel like they are not heard, or that they are "too little" to make a difference in the world. Kid President defies this reasoning though. He is a regular kid viewed and listened to by millions of people. He has also had the opportunity to speak with the likes of Beyonce, President Obama, and many other influential people. He is a kid that is changing the world just by spreading positivity. Often Kid President challenges his viewers to consider how they are making the world more awesome, so these videos can potentially inspire a unit on healthy relationships, wellness, or social justice. I LOVE fantasy!! Perhaps it is because I grew up in the Harry Potter generation, perhaps it's because I secretly like to believe I'm really a long lost princess accidentally given to the wrong family. Either way, my shelves are filled with Christopher Paolini, Guy Gavriel Kay, to Tolkein and Johnathan Stroud. Yet I never really considered them study worthy literature until recently. Over the summer I took a class in Fantasy literature and had a blast, while examining many of the critical thinking perspectives I had also used in my other English classes. I crafted an essay I am particularly proud of that centered around the power of language in The Hobbit (Bilbo is a craftsman of languge, and there is nothing you can tell me to prove me otherwise!). I made me reconsider the cannon of literature one usually studies in school.
That's why I was so thrilled to read chapter 4 on speculative fiction in Reading Canada. Al the titles suggested in this section are ones I would have loved to read in high school, heck I already added several to my reading list. It is important that people realize that these novels are just as relevant to society and critical thinking practices as Shakespeare, and most importantly, they are more accessible for student engagement. As the chapter suggests, speculative fiction has a greater capacity to explore the what if. All good fiction is about ordinary characters that do extraordinary things, but speculative fiction takes that one step further, and explores the ifs of our future and the mistakes of our past. Students see characters surmount impossible odds in perilous circumstances, which I think has the potential to empower students to think through their own problems and struggles. Like any other novel, speculative fiction is still open to post-colonial, feminist, and all other types of critiques. And if you can critique the absurdity of the fantastical, you can critique the absurdity of real life as well. |
AuthorStephanie is a student at the University of Lethbridge. From pre-service teacher to the classroom, here begins her journey into the ELA classroom. ArchivesCategories |