Spring Student Teaching

So, fall semester is finally deciding to wrap itself up.  My November Unit came to a happy conclusion and now I am left to pull my fall portfolio together and plan for Spring. 

Everytime I talk to my MT, she has something different to say about how Spring is going to work.  We will have three people in the room during first block, me, my MT and an inclusion teacher.  It will be my first experience with inclusion, and seeing as how this is the way of the future, I think it is a very important experience.  This last time I spoke with my MT, she informed me that she wanted me to do the majority of the planning for the 9th grade college prep class and the 10th grade honors classes.  I’m, actually, really pleased with that, so here are the tentative units that I have to plan for the spring.

 9th grade:

Personal Narratives – Short stories and poems

Holocaust Unit – Elie Wiesel’s Night and other short pieces

Mythology Unit – I want to do one, but I’m not particularly fond of the Odyssey.  I wonder if I can do a mythology unit minus the Odyssey?

Shakespeare Unit – Romeo and Juliet

For the 10th grade:

Media Literacy Unit

Things Fall Apart

Taming of the Shrew

Medea

The big themes for tenth grade are: “How are we persuaded?” and “How do we persuade?”  I would like for the tenth graders to do a really creative, inquiry-based project.  We’ll see how that goes though.  I’m really excited about teaching a Shakespearean comedy, though.  Never thought I’d be able to do that next semester.

I’ll update as my plans solidify.  Ahhh… I’m so excited! I think I might just love student teaching.

Zodiac Characterization & First Observation

Today was a fairly hectic day for me.  My teacher days keep getting longer and longer. The girls in my carpool always joke about how we drive to school while the sun rises and we drive back in time to see it set.  It’s kind of sad having so little time before it’s time to go to bed and then do it all over again.  I’m getting used to it though.

I did survive my first observation, though.  And, I’m very pleased about that.  We just finished Romeo and Juliet yesterday, so my kids were starting off on the first step to preparing for their scenes.  Stop one was an adapted version of the What’s Your Sign? Zodiac Characterization activity that I stole from the lesson plans archive at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Instead of using the old zodiac charts that they provided I used zodiac strips as a starting point for a journal.

The had to create a character from the adjectives of their Zodiac strips.  They had the option of including information like a name, age, occupation, marital status, income, children, spouse or children’s names, hobbies, pets, etc. After they created the journals they paired up with another student, and wrote a dialog on one of three scenerios.  The scenerios were:

 1. Two peopel on a blind date are sitting in a restaurant. They have just ordered their food. There is a long, uncomfortable silence. . .

 2. Two people are waiting for a bus. One person notices that the other has been staring at him/her for a long time. . .

 3. Two people are walking their dogs in the streets of a neighborhood. One person’s dog starts growling at the other person’s much smaller dog. . .

They came up with some crazy dialogs. My favorite was a dialog created from scenerio #1:

Allen: Why are you so quiet?

Melissa: (says nothing!)

Allen: Please talk to me.

Melissa: Hi!

Allen: Are you still in school?

Melissa: Yes!

Allen: What classes are you taking?

Melissa: My major is art!

Allen: My major is math!

Melissa: Are you quick at math?

Allen: It depends on what problem you give me.

Melissa: Ok!

Allen: (To himself) I wonder if I can get her to pay for dinner tonight. Maybe I should make up an excuse to get out of here and leave her the check.

Melissa: I hope you are not bored.

Allen: No. But I got to do more math. Bye!

Melissa: What about the check?

Allen: Bye!

After the had written their dialogs, I put their transparencies up on the overhead projector and I asked them to give me adjectives to describe each character. For Allen, they told me he was “not caring,” “bored,” “rude,” “cheap,” “selfish,” and “sneaky.” Melissa was “shy” and “focused.” We looked at a few examples and then we launched off into characterization and how Shakespeare’s characterizes through dialog.

The then did some worksheets that helped them get to know their character through their character’s own actions, their character’s words and the words that other characters speak about the character in question.  It was all very fun and they seemed to enjoy it.

I think this is definitely a lesson to keep. I’m like the kids. I like any excuse to turn out half the lights.

National Novel Writing Month?

No one told me that November was National Novel Writing Month!  I was just browsing through Laurie Halse Anderson’s blog and found this really cool challenge to write a complete 50,000 word novel, from scratch, in just one month. 

Presenting at GCTE in February

I think I’m really going to do it.  I had initially planned to present something along the lines of reading comprehension strategies for low-level 7-12 students, but, as a lowly student teacher, I don’t feel experienced enough yet.  Instead, I’m going to tackle something with a little less pressure attached to it: Young Adult Literature.  I don’t think it’s a big surprise, considering how ambivalent I tend to be toward “The Canon.”

What I plan to do is introduce why Young Adult Literature is important in the middle school and high school classroom, how it can be included within an English curriculum at these levels and how to keep up with and access YA Lit novels using journals and the Internet.

I just returned from the library with some nice print resources that I’m going to draw from in preparation for my presentation and accompanying paper.  These are definitely great resources for the English teacher curious about YA lit and how to incorporate it into the classroom. 

Herz, Sarah K. and Donald R. Gallo. From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult Literature and the Classics.  Second Edition. (2005)

Monseau, Virginia R. and Gary M. Salvner, Eds. Reading their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom.  (1992)

A great online resource is The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, an organization who publishes a Young Adult Literature journal called the ALAN Review.  The ALAN Review publishes articles about the genre or YA Literature as well as book reviews of newly published YA novels.

Picture Notes

Today was the first day of my two and a half week November Unit on Romeo & Juliet.  My students are studying a prose retelling of the play and will be working, within acting companies, toward performing one scene of their choice.  Based on today’s journal responses about what they know about Shakespeare or Romeo and Juliet and whether or not they are looking forward to studying this unit, I think that it will work out all right.

I started today off with trying something called picture notes.  This class is a group of struggling readers, so I wanted to introduce them to Shakespeare in a way that goes beyond words and employs pictures, gestures and other senses.  I found the idea of using picture notes from Michelle Zoss’s article “Visual Strategies for Teaching Student’s Note-taking,” provided through TeachersBridge.  For more on how to incorporate the arts into a language and literature curriculum, Zoss cites E.W. Eisner’s “The Misunderstood Role of the Arts in Human Development,” in The Kind of Schools We Need (1998) and E.W. Eisner’s The Arts and the Creation of Mind (2002) as great print resources to consult.

To start off today’s lesson, I drew a picture summary of the events of Romeo and Juliet to use as an example for them and modeled for them how to use picture notes with a brief PowerPoint that I did on Shakespeare’s contributions to language and The Globe Theater.

The class then broke off into groups to read about different aspects of Elizabethan culture and then moved into different groups to teach each other about the aspects of Elizabethan culture in which they had become “experts.”  The jigsaw activity was fairly successful except for a goof that I made in terms of numbers.  I never claimed to be good at math.  The mess-up boggled my mind for longer than I feel comfortable admitting.

Next time I will limit my students to one or two text notes and two pictures, though.  I still had some kids who tried to copy down everything that they read on their paper and in my PowerPoint.

Turningpoint

For me and my English Education cohort, today is a turningpoint of sorts.  It is our last day of on-campus class until after our 2 week November Units are completed.  I will be teaching a performance-based unit on a prose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, which I will be posting some of my lessons from on this blog in the near future.

 I just can’t believe that so much time has passed by.  This very exhausting semester is winding down, and I feel more and more like a “real” teacher every day.  I’m grateful that I have the MT that I do.  It seems like we are going through some of the same anxieties that accompany change.  The future is like a “big gray” cloud, and, quite frankly, we’re both more than a little scared.  She’s facing grad school and searching for a new job, while I’m facing the daunting process of finding my first teaching job.

 Yesterday, I started going over all the nitpicky things of creating a quality resumé.  The paperwork is exciting, but scary at the same time.  I can’t wait until all of that is over and I’m at the interviewing stage.  I’m trying to keep my job search pretty broad, considering multiple counties around where my parents live and between where I live and Athens.  So far, this is my list of school districts in which I would like to work in order of preference:

1. Houston County 2. Bibb County 3. Washington County 4. Baldwin County

So there is all of that application stuff, but I’m also looking at planning my ten week student teaching units during my November Unit.  I know that I’ll be teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Medea.  Ideally, I would also like to figure out some way to tie an inquiry project into that, but I’m still working on how nicely that would all tie together and segue nicely into one another.  I’m excited and hopeful about that ten week period, though.