Say/Do 10: Organizing Units with Literature

Pathways to the Common Core
Response & Analysis 
"Building Bridgings"
"What Else? Other Approaches"

Say

Probst raises many good points on pairing texts that I had not given much thought.  He offers two possibilities.  One where, "The teacher chooses as haphazardly and casually as the typical reader might choose his books."  In this scenario, the paired texts are unlikely to be similar or contrast well enough to provoke rich class discussions.  The other scenario is where the texts fit so well together that the teacher may inadvertently hinder discussion.  If students find two paired texts have a common theme that disagrees with the teacher's preconceived theme, the teacher then must decide whether to stay the course or "monitor and adjust."

Gallo's chapter "Building Bridges" emphasizes pairing young adult novels with the canon to engage and scaffold students into the less familiar literary canon.  Selecting the right theme for a given unit can be difficult, but I find the process of collecting texts that fit that theme to be quite fun.  I wonder if I would have enjoyed Shakespeare in high school if my teachers had paired Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth with other texts.  I never read young adult novels until I was in college so it is hard to say how much they would have influenced my willingness to ploy through 16th-17th century lit, but I can say that I would have a better grasp of the canonical text's bigger picture.

Do

This is an article I used in conjunction with "The Most Dangerous Game" this semester.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/robert_hansen/7.html

(Lesson Plan) Say/Do 9: Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary

Say

Pathways to the Common Core
When Kids Can't Read

Conventions of Standard English Writing and Speaking pt. 1 and 2

The Grammar Workshop

Vocabulary and grammar instruction has to been one of the more challenging aspects of teaching ELA.  Not because these aspects are particularly difficult, more because of how dull and dry these subjects can be for students.  The videos highlight the importance of helping students grow their vocabulary, and master standard English grammar.  

I like that other forms of English are valued in the Common Core.  Just last week in my home languages lesson, I taught students about dialect and how these can be used in their creative writing.  Dialogue formatting was something I picked up on my own.  None of my teachers or professors really took the time to go over a pretty basic aspect of writing that readers see in nearly every short story and novel, so much so that the nuances go unnoticed by many readers.  By teaching dialogue I was able open up a natural avenue for students to bring in their home languages into their writing.  Some students were hesitant when I asked them whether it was okay to use ain't, but they were receptive to using ain't and other "slang" words in a short story assignment I gave them.  My personal favorite phrase was "throwing shade," which means to trash talk or denounce a friend.  Throwing shade seems like a modern version of "cast in a bad light," but I personally prefer the imagery in throwing shade.

Building vocabulary needs to consist of connections like the one I just made.  There are several approaches to vocabulary that draw on what students know to help them bridge the gap to understanding new words.  Having students learn through examples and non-examples is one way to do this.  Having students define new words with simple, "student friendly" definitions is another method.  Vic's "visual vocab" has students studying one word at a time to produce a visual/definition product that can then be used as a tool to help other students learn that one.  One of my personal favorite methods that worked for me as a student was writing a paragraph using vocabulary words.  I made a mindless, but mildly humorous story on each of vocab quizzes for AP English.  As a writer I enjoyed it, but many students struggled applying new words like this on the fly.

The grammar workshop article provided answers for many of my questions surrounding grammar instruction.  Namely, how do I make this stuff fun and engaging?  I have experience with mentor texts and try to implement them whenever possible, but the show and tell essays were a neat approach that I think would be useful in a regular ELA classroom for getting students to apply particular grammatical skills.

Do

 A lesson plan where I tried to have students apply their knowledge of protagonist/antagonist dynamics, conflict, and dialogue to write their own short story.

https://sites.google.com/site/wparrinternshipa/section-ii-lesson-plans/acf-lesson-plans/lp-5-the-most-dangerous-game

(Classroom Artifact) Say/Do 8: Writing Multiple Genre

Say

Styslinger - "Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers"
Allen - "Create Flow: Pulling it All Together"
Romano - "Multigenre Stirrings"
Blitz - "Teaching Literature Through the Multigenre Paper: An Alternative to the Analytical Paper"

I want to be a flexible teacher who's willing and able to adapt to whatever situation pops up.  Some students do not want options, or at least not too many options, while others desire more freedom when it comes to assignments.  For the past three weeks I have been working with my freshman class on a research paper.  It has been painful to put it lightly for everyone in involved I can safely say.  The students, my CT, and me all seem to be dragging through the assignment like a Common Core death sentence.  My CT wants class to learn research methodology because its in the standards and because apparently some sadist put MLA citations on the End of Course Exam for English I.

Does anyone not use EasyBib.com or similar websites to fill out the works cited and bibliography page of every crap essay that gets churned out?

Needless to say Styslinger and Blitz's articles on multigenre papers gave me some hope for when I am inevitably trapped into teaching MLA to students who are statistically unlikely to wind up being English scholars, i.e. the only people who use MLA in their work place.  By having students write multigenre works they not only become flexible and versatile writers, but thinkers as well.  The sheer amount of options available could be daunting for students, but if the proper scaffolds are in place for them, the end results would certainly be worth the effort. 

Romano describes the teaching community's consistent downplaying of creative writing as a worthwhile cognitive pursuit.  I have found the opposite to be the case in the practicum.  Students have a lot of difficulty with creative writing.  A lot of that comes down to self-censoring and inexperience.  While students are unlikely to be tested on their ability to write seamlessly connect highly disparate genres, the mental faculties involved will likely give them the tools to adapt to testing situations. 

  

Do

This short story assignment builds on a previous list writing engagement (If you knew me you would know) and a refection on a personal "antagonist."

Name:

Writing a Short Story

Today we will be writing a draft of a short story.  The story will star yourself as the protagonist and will feature a person vs. person conflict.  You will decide on a setting and an antagonist for this conflict. 

Setting

The setting of a short story is the time and place in which it happens. Authors often use descriptions of landscape, scenery, buildings, seasons or weather to provide a strong sense of setting.

        

Choose one (1) of the following locations to set our story or make up your own setting.

            a. an abandoned parking lot at midnight

           

b. a crowded mall on Black Friday

           

c. an A.C. Flora playoff football game

           

d. graduation day at A.C. Flora

           

e. _______________________

Characters

A character is a person who takes part in the action of a short story or other literary work.

Protagonist/Main character: Cast yourself as your story’s protagonist. Think back to our “If you knew me you would know that…” list for interesting details that you may want to include to describe yourself to the reader.

Antagonist: Use an antagonist that you came up with from Monday, come up with a new one, or use of the following antagonists in your story.  (Remember that the antagonist does not have to be evil/bad, just that they clash with the protagonist in some way.)

a. Darth Vader

b. Lord Voldemort

c. Mr. Parr

d. The Joker

e. ___________________

***You can have additional characters, but the minimum required will be a protagonist and antagonist***

Conflict

The conflict is a struggle between two people or things in a short story. The main character is usually on one side of the central conflict.

For this story we will be using person versus person conflict. 

Plot

A plot is a series of events and character actions that relate to the central conflict.

Your job will be deciding what happens between the protagonist (yourself) and the antagonist.   This will make up the plot of your story.

(Classroom Artifact) Say/Do 7: Reading Like a Writer

Daniels and Steineke - Mini-Lessons For Literature Circles
Ray - Wondrous Words

Say

This week's readings have been helpful for me in understanding how to get students to think about the craft of writing without bogging them down with dozens of literary devices all at once.  I learned my creative writing style from emulating author's I enjoyed reading, not from any specific lesson or teacher.  Developing a sense of style takes time, borrowing, mix and matching, experimentation, and failure.  It didn't take me long to figure out that writing anything completely, stone-faced serious was difficult for me to do well in any authentic way.  A lot of my academic writing contains so much fat and filler it makes me feel bloated thinking about it, but I hate writing that goes on and on and on, with paragraphs that never end and arguments that go in circles rather than getting to the point.  But I emulate that dribble because it fills pages.

Ray's rundown of the differences between teaching prescriptively and descriptively were very helpful for me.  Particularly because I was asked to create and teach a grammar mini-lesson for next week.  My coaching teacher's freshman class use a lot of run-on sentences and have issues with basic sentence formatting like capitalization and punctuation, so here I am wondering how to teach things like coordinating conjunctions and FANBOYS and whether I actually needed a comma for ",so here I am..."  Oh and semi-colons which I refrain from using because of their wishy washy ambivalence.

I likely will try out the Mentor Sentence strategy for my students, and find a strong sentence that features some of the craft elements that my CT wants them to learn.  In my previous placement, that CT also used Mentor Sentences, but they became a weekly thing that had a chunk of time set aside for students work on them daily.  I feel sort of semi-colonesque about Mentor Sentences becoming a daily routine, although much of my worry about the strategy comes from students not making sense of the STAR method (Substitute, Take Out, Add, and Rearrange) my CT tacked on to Mentor Sentences.  Some sentences really made little to no sense for these language manipulation exercises, which led to many students losing sight of the fundamentals that were the focus of the strategy.

Do

Mentor Sentence

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. (Vonnegut)."  From Mother Night.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that" (King).  From Strength to Love.

Step One

Consider the following:

·     What do you notice about the sentence?

·     What do you like about the sentence?

·     What do you think the author's intent is for this sentence?

·     What do you notice about the author’s craft in particular?

Step Two:  Find another! 

Step Three:  Imitation!

 

Say/Do 6 Close Reading

Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading - Kylene Beers and Robert E Probst

"The Sky is a Landfill" - Jeff Buckley

Yeah he did more songs than "Hallelujah," crazy.

Say

Notice and Note got my brain jogging up a proverbial hill thinking about the place reading has in my life.  I wish I could sit still and read for novels like I used to when I was 14.  Oh and textbooks and articles?  Nothing could be more of chore than chugging through anything Probst has touched.  The text has a practical approach (Thank you Kylene Beers, thank you.) that I appreciate, but a lot of the charts are so similar that I question the need to fill up a fourth of the book with them.

Today most of my reading takes place digitally, however, I prefer to read print still.  There are some drawbacks to the page.  I for one despise having to mangle the spine of a book whenever I am writing an essay (or blog) for instance.  For whatever reason I was not graced with owl eyes, and cannot read in the dark.  Yet, with reading on computers, tablets, phones, and other devices has a degree of eyestrain not present with traditional print reading.  Not being able to chuck a digital book across the room in a fit of rage at the death of a favorite character sucks as well.  I doubt it will be long before physical books are a hipster relic akin to vinyl, but until then I prefer to read and teach texts that can be held, marked up, and destroyed if need should arise. 

Question 10 on lifelong learners resonates with what I want to accomplish in the classroom.  A large part of who I am today originates with books that I read in middle and high school.  More often than not, these books were not things I read in class.  They were books I picked out from one of the three ubiquitous shopping mall bookstores or from the library.  The importance and practicality of becoming a lifelong learner needs to be communicated to students.  Lets face it, a lot of the canon is not particularly inspiring or life-changing.  Students need intrinsic motivation to seek out texts that speak to them in some fashion.  As a teacher I have to figure out how to foster that need to learn.  Somehow.

Also holy **** were the 2007 graduation rates depressing.  I knew the statistics for minorities (aside from Asian Americans) were bad, but seeing them lined up together speaks to how ethnocentric the school system here really is (pg. 63).

Do

When I read the Again and Again lesson, I immediately thought of using this to teach motif, albeit less directly than throwing weird word (motif? mo tif? more teeth?) at students.  I feel like it would be pretty interesting to bring in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming into the classroom.  These spy stories all share a metaphorical excrement bucket of motifs.  The digestible nature of the text also lends itself for analysis.  Paired with clips from the film of some of Bond's "love interests" could also be a tie into the series' misogyny.

(Classroom Support Material) Say/Do 5: Book Clubs

Daniels and Steineke - Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles
Calkins, Ehrenworth, and Lehman - Pathways to the Common Core
Scharber - "Online Book Clubs"
Edmondson - "Wiki Literature Circles"

Say

Way back before the dawn of man, I remember having a book club in my high school English III class.  I recall the books being mostly regarded as classics or literary on some level.  Stuff like Catcher in the Rye and Confederacy of Dunces stuck out to me, but as I had already read them on my own, I went with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, mostly based off the title.  My group and I expected a witty, comedy somehow related to Buddhism and motorcycles (monks on motorcycles what's not to like?), but what we ended up with was a fairly difficult book on philosophy wrapped around a weak plot.  Needless to say, I gave up on it about halfway through.

Despite that slightly negative experience, I like the idea of using book clubs as a way to bring in non-canonical or risque canonical texts.  The options involved with book clubs allow less experienced readers to pick books that they feel comfortable with, and enable experienced readers the opportunity to expand their horizons. The two digital book club articles were helpful for me seeing how I could give gradable, accountability for the work students do in their clubs.  I particularly liked the idea of using a Wiki for book clubs.  The different roles for each club seemed a bit much, however.  I doubt that students would spend much of their time browsing the work of other students' wiki pages unless there was a grade attached to responding.  I also found it odd that daily (daily? really?) wiki contributions were only weighted 20 points, while the final literary analysis essay is weighted 100 points. 

  Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles's begins with a solid overview of all the various components that go into book clubs/literature circles.  I found this to be a good refresher for me, as well as moderate confirmation that I am doing at least somethings right in the classroom.  At Ridge View I feel like I did particularly well with reading strategy instructions.  I focused mostly on helping students with visualizing, connecting, inferring, and analyzing with their reading, but I covered most of the others, albeit less explicitly.   The authors also include "What can go wrong sections" for each mini-lesson.  My planning process has lately involved a pick of this type of thinking.  Being prepared for the worse and maintaining flexibility never hurts.

Do

I thought I would select some books that could be used together as part of a book club someday.  The novels are centered around World War II and feature multiple perspectives on the various locations of the conflict.  No-No Boy covers the struggles of a Japanese-American who's wish to serve the U.S. military is denied.  Catch-22 details the surreal and absurdity of war on the Italian front from the perspective of U.S. airmen.  A Stranger to Myself is the memoir from the perspective of a German soldier fighting in Russia, and tells of his realizations about his country's duplicitous nature before his death on his 5th tour.  Mother Night tells the story of an American spy working for the Nazis who did too good of a job in his time with his country's enemy.

 

(Classroom Artifact) Say/Do 4: Fostering Talk Around Literature

Probst - Response & Analysis
Calkins, Ehrenworth, Lehman - Pathways to the Common Core
Milner, Milner, Mitcell - Bridging English
Copeland - Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School
Styslinger, Pollock - "The Chicken and the Egg: Inviting Response and Talk through Socratic Circles"

Say

Technology has many advantages, namely the ability to connect people that are oceans apart.  However, living in a screen filled age can make it all too easy to filter out the world around us.  The upcoming generations of students will have less experience with speech than any other generation, which makes it imperative that students learn and develop as not only readers and writers, but as speakers and listeners as well.

Too often English teachers have to justify the importance of the subject to students and other professionals.  The importance of conversation and public speaking skills leaves little room for counterargument.  Nearly everyone will have a job where they need to interact and collaborate with others.  Pathways to the Common Core also points to language standards' role in helping students develop into critical media consumers and citizens.  I certainly do not want to teach future generations to be unquestioning of what they read and what they are told.

Then comes the issue of how to implement these oral language into lessons.  I personally have not had much expeience with explicitly teaching strategies like Voice Lessons from Bridging English but I do make sure all of my lessons have students talking in multiple contexts.  Basic skills like speaking loudly enough, eye contact, not talking over others, respecting others ideas, etc. are vital for having productive class conversations.

These skills can be developed through many strategies, but Socratic Circle seems apt for teaching them to students.  Copeland's chapter 2 details the procedures for running an effective Socratic Circle and I found this reading particularly healthy in understanding the process.  Styslinger and Pollock's article provides transcripts from successful Socratic Circles, which was likewise helpful for me to see how this strategy could be realized in the classroom.

Do 

Below are student samples for a Coat of Arms symbolism activity that I had students do as a tie in with "The Cask of Amontillado."   Overall students were successful in meeting my objectives for this lesson, but when it came time for presenting them, they had difficulty in explaining their work despite having written an explanation of their coat of arms already. If I had a chance to do this activity over, I would try to build in time for tips and guidelines for doing a presentation.