For those of you teaching American Literature . . . a gift (I hope)

For my current or future American Literature teachers out there, this link might help you out a little bit.  The state of Georgia has recently finished realigning it’s standards.  (In place of a set of standards that were called QCCs, we now have the GPS, which I find incredibly useful because of how unambiguous and explicit they are in, finally, explaining what it is teachers should be teaching their students in each grade and subject area.  I don’t like too many restrictions when it comes to planning, but it really gives enough guidance to be comforting and leaves enough room for freedom and creativity.  For these reasons, the GPS are quite welcome, as far as I’m concerned.)

Despite the fact that the old standards have been done away with and that these lessons plans have been “deactivated,” there are many, many good ideas within these pages and within these links (to other web sites as well as to lesson plan worksheets).  In the American Literature pages, there are thirteen units with detailed lesson plans, links, worksheets, and ideas for differentiation.  I highly recommend checking it out. 

That means lesson plans for people who teach these novels:

The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and House on Mango Street. 

There are also lesson plans for people who would like resources for:

Native American Literature unit, Colonial American Literature unit, Age of Reason / Rationalism unit, Romanticism unit, American Poetry unit, Realism unit and Modern American Literature unit.

I like a lot of the lesson plans because they try to create plans that require students to use inductive and deductive reasoning skills.  Hopefully you’ll be able to find at least something that you like enough to modify and use for yourself.

I’ve been trying to see if I can find similar pages for World or British Literature.  I’ve yet to find those. 

Of course, GeorgiaStandards.org also provides lesson ideas on that newer site.  Happy Planning!  I’m off to continue rediscovering all the subtle beauties and depths of The Scarlet Letter that eluded me all those years ago, when I first read it in sophomore English.

Beginning the Year

So, it’s the beginning of the year and I’m sure there are many teachers (especially, first year ones, like me) who are scrambling to find productive and engaging activities to start the year off with.  Of all the activities that I have found for beginning the school year, the best one that I have come across is called “The Wright Family Vacation.”  It is a listening activity with a fairly basic procedure.  Students must stand around in a circle, each with a penny in his or her hand, and listen as the teacher reads a passage.  Everytime the students hear the words “left” or “right” in the passage, they are to pass the penny either to the left or the right, accordingly.

The full procedure for this activity may be found, here, in RTF format.  A link to Redkudu’s more recent blog entries can be found to the right, in my blogroll.  The author of this blog has also requested that I add a small caveat explaining that this activity is not her intellectual property, nor is she aware of whom to cite as its creator.

English GACE Test

So, I cannot help but notice that the majority of my visitors come here frantically searching for something related to the GACE (Georgia Assessment for the Certification of Educators) test.  While my experience of the test was that it was not very difficult at all, I did go into it having just completed an English degree and completing an English Education degree.  While I am in no way qualified to talk about other sections of the GACE, I have created, for a friend, a mini-study guide of topics that it may behoove you to be familiar with if you are taking the English portions of this test.

I do want to note that I have no way of knowing what questions will appear in the upcoming GACE tests and what topics will be most prevalent.  The best guides available are still the ones that appear in the preparation materials section of the GACE website.  Familiarizing yourself with the GPS (Georgia Performance Standards) might be another good way for  you to become familiar with the types of skills and material expected to be taught in your content area.  These new standards for English Language Arts, for example, includes a new section dedicated to listening, speaking and viewing.  To go along with that set of standards, the GACE test that I took seemed to include many questions on media literacy viewing strategies, methods of persuasion and logical fallacies.  It is also my experience that you will not be asked questions that pertain to educational psychology or educational theory (except, perhaps, the extremely well-known terms and names, like Vygotsky and contructivism).

With that being said, I encourage you to check out my English GACE Review.  Good luck to all of the future teachers of Georgia who will be taking the GACE over the next few months. 

My very first classroom, classroom management, and Scarlet Letter Lit Circles

So, I have officially completed my county’s new teacher orientation.  Some of it was thoroughly mindnumbing, but there were positive aspects to it, as well.  I made friends with the other new English teacher in my high school, a first year (and, therefore, terrified) TAPP teacher who will be teaching tenth grade at another high school in the county, and an elementary school teacher who will be teaching fourth grade.  I, also, had the opportunity to become friends with a young man (as young as me!), who just graduated from college (and, is a TAPP teacher, as well).  It turns out that we are also hall neighbors, with him right across from me.

All in all, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.  I took advantage of the free stuff, I appreciated the free lunch and, most of all, I took away some really good ideas for classroom management.  Thinking about the year to come, I had been struggling a little bit with deciding what types of incentives and consequences I would give my high school students.  High school students are often not as mature as they would have you believe, but you certainly don’t want to run the risk of making them feel as though you are infantilizing them.  Woe to the teacher whose students laugh at him or her over their misled notion that stickers are still effective motivators.

While the speaker at the last session of our orientation offered a lot of great ideas about how to manage one’s classroom, I felt that a lot of the strategies offered by our speaker, and based on the discipline strategies of Dr. Terry Alderman, were aimed mostly at younger students, particularly at the elementary level.

For high school, I did take away a couple things that I wanted to implement, however.  One of the things that I really feel silly about doing in front of the classroom is holding up my arm in some gesture as I wait for them to quiet down and give me their attention.  I don’t know why this makes me feel particularly stupid, but it always does, regardless of whether or not it works (but, believe me I have felt much stupider the times that it hasn’t worked).  One strategy that I took from our speaker, Ms. Savage, was to have a certain number of colored bracelets around one wrist, and switching them to the other wrist if I am holding out my hand and they continue to ignore that gesture for getting quiet and giving me their attention.

I really thought that it would be a good idea.  You could even pull this off with hair ties or rubber bands, although I would imagined that those plastic colored bracelets that have been all the rage and/or colored hair ties would be much more visible.  The important thing in all of the strategies that the speaker shared, regardless of grade level, was that students have a visual cue to motivate them and let them know where they stand on the behavior spectrum of “good” to “not doing so hot.”  I want to use them to determine how much time students will be given at the end of the class as free time to sit in their desks and read, talk, or work on their homework.  If I have five or more bracelets on the “good” wrist by the end of the day, they get their entire five minutes.  If I have less than five, they get the number of minutes left on the “good” wrist.  Bracelets will move from the “good” to “bad” wrist in my class when I have to wait more than ten seconds for the class to quiet down or when a student blurts something out while another student, or I am talking.  One student can only lose one bracelet for their class in a day.  If that same student breaks any of the guidelines again that day, they will be given a warning, and then teacher detention.

My teacher detention usually builds by increments of 15 minutes.  I start with 15 minutes and if a student commits another offense, another 15 minutes will be added on to their time.  Students have a week, or five days, to come and serve my detention before I will write an office referral.  Of course, all major offenses will be dealt with by an immediate office referral. 

Students for whom it is difficult to refrain from talking or any other minor, but persistent, behavior, will be dealt with in teacher-student conferences.  Once a student receives three teacher detentions, they will sit down with the teacher and fill out a behavior contract that outlines their understanding of the problems that they seem to be having with the classroom guidelines, the strategies that the teacher and student will use to try to fix the interruptions, as well as, motivators and consequences for sticking to or breaking the contract.

I think that this is a wonderful idea because it allows me to talk one-on-one with students about what is troubling them, lets them know that I am on their side, and that tells them that I am willing to problem solve with them about how to solve these problems.

As another incentive, I am going to employ what Ms. Savage called Mystery Motivator.  Whenever I catch a student being prepared or staying on task at certain random times, I will give them a slip from my paper cube.  They will write their name on this piece of paper and slip it into the jar marked for their period.  I will let the jar accumulate for two weeks, and then I will pick a random name.  The student whose name I pick will be given a secret prize kept inside the mystery box or mystery envelope.

This is basically the classroom management plan that I have put together for my class this year.  I feel that it’s both fair and respectful to students.  I just hope that it ends up being a successful plan, because I know how difficult classroom management is for so many first year teachers.

In other news: I received my one hundred dollars from the governor.  “Sonny Money” as some teacher apparently refer to it.  I don’t know what I am going to spend it on, yet, but there is certainly a lot that I could spend money on.  I am still going to ask my department head if it would be possible to purchase a certain set of books for me to teach literature circles with the Scarlet Letter unit in order to get students more engaged in this difficult text.  I believe that while the text can be exceedingly difficult in its language and syntax, that students will be able to better understand and access the themes, if they have to read thematically-related books about which they can more easily relate.

The Young Adult novels that I have chosen as perfect literature circle selections to read in conjunction with The Scarlet Letter are as follows:

Monster – Walter Dean Myers

About a boy who is on trial for his participation in a robbery turned murder. This book begs a lot of questions regarding the degrees of innocence, the responsibility ability of one person to judge and decide the fate of another person, as well as, the degree to which an experience like this changes the way people look at you and you look at yourself.

Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson

Amazon.com Review:
Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it’s been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud.  What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors’ big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it’s because her parents’ only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she’s been struck mute…

Contains some sexual themes, as the reader finds out that Melinda was the victim of a rape.

Baby Be-Bop – Francesca Lia Block

From School Library Journal:
Grade 10 Up? A prequel to the popular books about Weetzie Bat and her circle of quirky friends and relatives. This novel is about her best pal, Dirk, in his pre-Weetzie days. He’s in high school (in L.A., of course), living with Grandma Fifi and struggling with how to come out to his best friend and soulmate. When a gang of gay bashers beats him up, he drags himself home and passes out. While he’s unconscious, long-dead relatives he’s never known come to him in what seem to be dreams.  His visions assure him that “There was love waiting; love would come.” Block writes distinctively and convincingly, interweaving the hallucination scenes smoothly. She makes the power of stories felt?and here, more purposefully than ever before, she weaves a safety net of words for readers longing to feel at home with themselves.

(Brief drug references, some sexual content, sensitive subjects dealing with sexual orientation.)

The First Part Last – Angela Johnson

From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up-Brief, poetic, and absolutely riveting, this gem of a novel tells the story of a young father struggling to raise an infant. Bobby, 16, is a sensitive and intelligent narrator. His parents are supportive but refuse to take over the child-care duties, so he struggles to balance parenting, school, and friends who don’t comprehend his new role. Alternate chapters go back to the story of Bobby’s relationship with his girlfriend Nia and how parents and friends reacted to the news of her pregnancy. 

(some potentially sensitive subject matter about teen parenthood)

Native Son - Richard Wright

From Library Journal
After 58 years in print, Wright’s Native Son has acquired classic status. It has not, however, lost its power to shock or provoke controversy. Bigger Thomas is a young black man in 1940s Chicago who accidentally kills the daughter of his wealthy white employer. Though his fate is certain, he finds that his crimes have given meaning and energy to his previously aimless life, and he goes to his execution unrepentant. Out of this tale the author develops a profoundly disturbing image of racism and its results that puts Bigger’s experience in horrifying perspective.

(Parents should be aware of violent language and situations contained in this book.)

Return from Summer Hiatus + Review: Octavian Nothing

So, it has been quite a while since I have been able to update this blog.  I have graduated, moved into my new loft, and taken the entire summer to have as much fun as possible before this upcoming school year.  I just found out that I will be teaching two classes of American Lit and one class of World Lit.  I’m very excited, but, also a little bit nervous.  I suppose that is only normal for a first-year teacher, though.

I have spent some time this summer reading some YA Lit.  So, here is one YA Lit book review for now.  I’ll be planning for my classes in the next couple weeks, but hopefully I will have the opportunity to update again.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party – M.T. Anderson

M.T. Anderson is by no means a stranger to the world of YA Lit, having written several highly acclaimed young adult novels that have already found their way onto the library shelves and course syllabi of many high schools across the nation.  I noticed that his novel Burger Wuss  made it onto the summer reading list for my high school this year; and, perhaps, his better known novel, Feed, was a National Book Award Finalist a couple years back. 

His new novel, Octavian Nothing, follows the childhood of a young boy in the American colonies on the eve of the Revolutionary War.  We know that Octavian is the son of a princess and prince from a country across the ocean.  We know that Octavian is the brilliant protegee of the “enlightened scholars” who populate the Novanglican College of Lucidity, behind whose walls Octavian lives his studious, but sheltered, life.  What we are left to answer for ourselves is the question of who Octavian is.  Why is he so important, and for what purposes is he being taught and sheltered by the Novanglican Church of Lucidity?

Written in elegantly heightened and beautiful prose, from the point of view of our protagonist, Octavian, M.T. Anderson allows readers to witness the birth of a nation from a point of view that continues to be largely ignored in historical accounts and fictional narratives, alike.  Anderson asks us to examine the hypocrisy that exists between the ideals on which countries are founded and the reality of those ideals in practice.  Through his focus on the horrifying experience of one individual through a time that is generally looked upon idealistically and nostalgically, we are confronted with the question of what it means to be a citizen of or a traitor to a nation. 

I cannot praise this book enough.  I think that it should be required reading for all high school American Literature students.  While the language may prove a little difficult, it would be more than worth it to try to teach a book that deals with such compelling, important and contemporarily relevant themes.  This is, by far, the best YA book that I have read, and I can’t wait for the second volume to come out.

Hopefully there will be more posts to come, now that I am back in the habit of thinking about school.

Good luck to everyone anticipating and planning for the beginning of another school year.