Teaching Tragic Heroes

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching my tenth grade (honors) literature and composition class about tragic heroes.  We are in the middle of a classical tragedy unit and just finished reading Antigone today.  I will be teaching them an adapted form of a lesson that I found here.  It’s a good way for students to learn inductively and actively explore the characteristics that might constitute a tragic hero instead of having a teacher flat out give it to them.

I’ll probably post an update about how that goes.  I just wanted to share the resource with anyone who might be looking for something like that.

In other news, I am very excited about receiving my first phone call from a high school in the county that I am hoping to be hired in.  That was quick, if you ask me.

Planning the Media Literacy Unit

After a week of wasting away my time on MySpace and watching worthless television, I’m becoming more optimistic about student teaching and how much of the time I would be spending doing absolutely nothing better will at least be spent trying to become the best teacher that I can be for my now and future students.

I’m in the process of planning the 9th grade personal narrative unit and, today, I started planning the 10th grade media literacy unit.  I’ve found a wealth of materials online and am now coming face to face with the problem of narrowing down the resources that I will be able to use for a mere three week unit.  I could teach a class on this subject.  Perhaps, someday?

One of the best resources that I’ve found, oddly enough, has been a blog published by a magazine called Stay Free!.  They describe themselves as “a Brooklyn-based magazine that explores the politics and perversions of mass media and American culture.”  The media literacy program that they provide for high school and college teachers is amazing. 

From their blog I found out about Merchants of Cool, a PBS documentary detailing how corporations try to market their products to teenagers.  I am considering showing this toward the beginning of the unit.  Another introductory activity I picked up was a Powerpoint “Alphabet” excercise found in the curriculum’s course introduction.  From this slideshow students are tested on how well they know the environment surrounding them compared to letters that they see on commercial products all the time.

On a slightly off-topic, but still related, note, I also found on their site an intriguing article by Edward Jay Epstein entitled “The Marketing of Diamonds: How a successful cartel turned a worthless rock into a priceless gem.”  Between this, the constant references to “blood diamonds” in rap songs and the new movie Blood Diamond, I am beginning to feel unforgivably and irreversably conditioned, myself.  Perhaps I can tie my impending marriage and my conflicted desires and beliefs into the unit?  Ha!

But, I am having fun designing this unit.  Just have to get back to basics.  Logic. Rhetoric. Persuasion.  Logic. Rhetoric. Persuasion.

Student Teacher Turned Stripper?

So, Monday was my last day at my placement school for the fall semester.  My MT’s fourth block class, the little angels (ha! no, I’m kidding, they are very sweet), took it upon themselves to throw me a mini-party.  There were cookies and lollipops and a big jug of some orange liquid.  There were also many cards and a little yellow smiley face bag with a little plastic snow globe inside.

It was my last day of class and I had a really difficult time convincing myself that it was worth the effort to try to get them to do work that they obviously didn’t want to do.  So, when the mini-party commenced I was grateful that my duties as teacher were finally over.  The kids gave me their cards and the yellow bag, and then one student came up and gave me a dollar. 

What do you think I did?  I took the dollar.  And when some student made some comment about how I wasn’t a stripper, the student who had given me the dollar proceeded to try to give me ANOTHER dollar.  I just waved him off.  But, I didn’t give him his first dollar back.  Why did I take his first dollar, anyway?  What was I thinking?  Just one more piece of evidence to show that in situations involving students, sometimes I FREEZE.  How embarassing….

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.

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.

The Art of Inference, A Curious Incident, Indeed

So, I’ve been helping my MT with a class of struggling readers for the past month and a half, now.  I’ve been borrowing very heavily on Kylene Beers’ (who was just recently elected NCTE’s Vice President) When Students Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do.  It’s, honestly, one of the most helpful books I have come across as far as providing realistic and useful strategies for teaching low-ability or low-interest readers.  Every English teacher should have this on their bookshelf.  Since I have just sung Ms. Beers’ praises, I may as well provide a link to some of her reading strategies and lesson plans. 

This past Monday I presented a slightly modified inferencing lesson that I snagged from Beers.  I created a PowerPoint that briefly defined inference (authors imply, readers infer) and contained two images to start using inference with.  The follow-up was having students make inferences with a very short text:

 

He put down $10.00 at the window.  The woman behind the window gave $4.00.  The person next to him gave him $3.00, but he gave it back to her.  So, when they went inside, she bought him a large popcorn.

 

My first two texts were pieces of art that I thought might serve the lesson well.  The first piece was Pablo Picasso’s La Vie.  While I was preparing the presentation, it didn’t even enter my mind that nudity would be an issue with my oh so mature bunch of ninth graders. But, when my MT clicks the slide, I hear:

Giggle, giggle.

“They’re naked! Ms. P., why you showing us naked people?”

“Alright, get it out.  They are naked.”

Then one of the students pipes up, “Gosh, haven’t ya’ll ever seen a naked person before?”

 

More giggles.  For about two minutes.

 

I wonder if I’m ever going to get through this lesson.

 

When I finally do get them to start playing the game and giving me some answers, they came up with some really good inferences.  It was going fairly well when I asked a student volunteer to take everyone’s inferences and try to create a story for the painting.

 

“Well the girl on the left is the woman with the baby’s daughter.  The old woman on the right went to the store.  When her Mama gone, the girl on the left invite her boyfriend over and they start doing their thing, ya know?  Ya know, Ms. P?  They doing their thing and t    he Mama come back and she was mad, that’s why she look so mean.  The boyfriend has his hand out ‘cause he’s trying to explain.  That’s what’s happening Ms. P.”

 

Giggles.

 

I just know that I have lost control.  But, hey, check out the inferences.  So, I motion for my MT to click over to my next slide.  Surely, I can gain back some control here.  The piece was Edvard Munch’s The Scream.  No nudity here.

 

So I repeat the process and ask a volunteer to create a story from the inferences we heard.

“So, like this boy gets lost.  He gets separated from his family and he’s all alone, ‘cause in the picture he’s all alone.  And, he starts screaming because he’s retarded, too.  That’s why he’s screaming, because retarded people scream and they look like that.  Yeah, that’s what they look like, right Ms. P?”

For twenty seconds, I swore that I would never let my kids speak in class again.  Thank god, I have a more than understanding MT.