Burning Questions

A free-form list of questions:

1. What do I do if a student comes into class already convinced that they can’t write?
2. How can I develop a fair way of grading subjective projects? I agree with our general principle of building a rubric based on the elements we find most effective in a successful project, but the step-by-step process of evaluating each project against this rubric in a fair way is daunting.
3. How can I develop a rapport with students that helps them feel comfortable with me and creates a safe environment, but also enables me to maintain order?
4. How should I balance the curriculum requirements of my school with my desire to introduce new texts or activities into my lessons?
5. How can I make sure I am monitoring every student’s engagement? How can I prevent students from falling through the cracks, especially students with special needs?

How Can English Change the World?

I was thinking about this topic a few weeks ago after I posted the Neil Gaiman article here. He wrote: “We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

Adults write off teenagers all the time as dumb, narcissistic or lazy. Calling someone a “teenage girl” is basically a shorthand way of calling them over-emotional and stupid. Between their parents, teachers, coaches and any and all aspects of the media, teens are constantly listening to other people telling them what to do and who they should be.

English class is a chance for them to reclaim their own voice. I want them to know that what they think matters. They have the capacity to analyze texts on their own. I will help them develop analytical skills, but if they come to a different conclusion than me or their classmates, they just need to use evidence to convince us, and we will listen. I want them to develop confidence in their own thought processes. I’m not asking them to memorize facts, but instead I want them to become better thinkers and communicators. This confidence can overflow into other areas of their lives.

Moreover, I also want them to be able to communicate in the self-reflective mode. You don’t have many opportunities in Algebra II to talk about importance experiences in your own life or to process how you are feeling. I don’t think an English class loses any of its effectiveness when we build in time and space for students to write in journals or in personal essays or even write creatively as a way to express themselves. I volunteer at the youth group at my church, and it is striking and heartbreaking to hear all the different things teenagers have to deal with. Many times they force these struggles beneath the surface of their lives until they manifest in really hurtful ways. I want to challenge students take writing about themselves seriously and to realize that they can and often should express themselves in this way.

When teenagers have enough self-awareness to articulate their own struggles, hopes and ideas and when they can confidently analyze a text, either aloud or in writing, they will see the world differently. Students like this won’t just daydream about a better world, they will also know that they have the power to start creating it.

Drama in the English Classroom

At my school, we approached drama the same way we approached novels. That is, we read portions of them at home, then the teacher would talk about that section in class the next day and sometime facilitate class discussions on the section.

Most of the dramatic works we read were Shakespeare, although we did read some Ibsen senior year, I believe. The only two drama-related activities that I remember doing were 1) memorizing a monologue from Hamlet and reciting it in front of the class and 2) rewriting a scene from Hamlet in our own colloquial speech (aka teen idioms) in small groups.

I totally disagree with teaching drama in the same way you’d teach other texts. They aren’t the same thing at all! Plays are meant to be performed, so I definitely want to have students up and moving on days that we’re reading Shakespeare or other plays and seeing what it’s like to actually inhabit the language. I think it’s great to go see the play with your class, if at all possible, or at least watch a filmed performance or movie version with them, even if you can only watch parts of it. This gives them a sense of the full universe of a play beyond the words on page – actors’ choices (tone, volume, gestures), directors’ choices, lighting angles, costumes, sound, staging etc.  Also, doubtless you will have students in your class who are dying to get up and act something out or just be loud and goofy, and this is their chance to find a voice in your classroom. I don’t think you need to force everyone (your really shy kids, for example) to perform all the time in front of everyone, but there are other ways to pull them into the world of theater without that – maybe some of them could do an exercise like rewriting a scene in modern-day language, for example, as my teacher had us do.

Overall, I can’t wait to teach drama, because I really do think it’s a great opportunity to do something fun and different with your class and to showcase different students’ talents.

Diversity in the Classroom

As a teacher, it is daunting to imagine teaching a class of students with a variety of different needs, skills and abilities. However, I do think the benefits outweigh the challenges, and the reality is that we are all going to have diverse classrooms, no matter where we teach.

For a teacher, having students from different backgrounds or with different learning styles challenges you to take each day seriously and to be intentional in your preparation for each lesson. If you are asking yourself, how can I make sure this or that student is engaged today, then you will necessarily become more focused on building a more engaging and targeted lesson for everyone. It is likely easy to fall back on a routine that makes sense on paper or in theory, but the more experience you get teaching ELL students, for example, or students with ADHD or other learning disabilities, the more you will become sensitive to and cognizant of what works and what doesn’t. As much as I hope to build off of what I learn in class and what I learn from my fellow teachers, I know that much of this will be a case of trial and error. However, without trials and errors (and without serious reflection after the fact), I won’t learn how to improve!

I can imagine that some students might struggle with being in diverse classrooms, and they separate into groups that are more homogenous within the larger class.  Nonetheless, I think it is enormously valuable for them to be in class together – for students from different backgrounds, family situations and ability levels to be sitting side by side and learning the same thing. I hope to use this as an opportunity to have students learn more, not just about our texts or the English curriculum, but also about each other. Students need to learn that not everyone is like them and cultivating that kind of sensitivity and awareness is one of the most important reasons why we need to have diversity of every type in our classes. This is also one of the big reasons why I want to have them interact with each other as much as is helpful and feasible, as opposed to sitting at their desks, watching me lecture.

Schools Books vs. My Own Books

I tended to read anything I could get my hands on in middle and high school. This included books I found on my own, books my family recommended to me, magazines, stories online and, of course, books assigned at school.

Overall, I tended to find the books we read in class fairly interesting, if only because I just absorbed them into my mental “database” of books. If it could entertain me, I didn’t care if it was for school “or” for fun.

My English classes were pretty traditional – we did not stray far from the classic texts that most students read in 7th, 8th, 9th grade etc. Probably the dullest stretch for me as a student were the non-fiction essays we read in American Lit junior year (Puritans and transcendentalists took a lot of our time…), but I know some of my classmates loved some of that!

When I consider my future classes, I love the idea of shaking up the curriculum by removing some “classics” that students aren’t getting much out of and replacing these with books that a) my students might resonate more with and/or b) will challenge them in a new way. Whether this means adding more current YA books, adding books that reflect a new/different set of voices or simply building in time for them to read something of their own choice, I hope this will mean students are more engaged and more invested as readers, both in and outside of class.

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

This is a transcript of a speech Neil Gaiman gave this week in London, posted on The Guardian’s website.

It really is a fantastic discussion on what it means to give kids the chance to fall in love with fiction, for its own sake and as a gateway to future reading.

Fiction matters. And, aside (I think) from concerns as to age-level appropriateness, I agree with Gaiman that we shouldn’t limit a child’s reading repetoire to school-approved or “worthy” books – let them read what fascinates them and you can trust that they will ultimately be far more eager to read what we consider “classics.” Also, as someone with a soft spot for fantasy/sci-fi, I loved how he addresses the notion that fiction reading is “just” an escape. As Gaiman notes, Tolkien said that the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers!

Some of my favorite points:

“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different…

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled…

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.”

Tech in the Classroom

We didn’t use technology very much in my English classes growing up. It wasn’t until the end of high school that we began to have to submit our papers to sites that checked for plagiarism and began to be able to submit papers by email. College was the first time I used a program similar to Blackboard to access class materials. But digital literacy really wasn’t a priority in any of my English classes, in secondary school or college.  I remember it was my AP Biology in high school who was the most advanced in terms of tech in the classroom: He always had his lectures up on a screen behind him via PPT during class. That actually had an adverse effect, though – We were distracted by all the text on the screen and spent our class time diligently copying his slides, rather than actually listening to him and asking questions.

Classes I’ve observed recently, though, tend to make much better use of technology. At one of the schools where I observed in the spring, juniors in AP English were presenting multi-genre projects on The Great Gatsby. Many of them used Prezi presentations, videos and even Pinterest boards as genres and could show these to their classmates on a Smartboard. Several of the teachers I observed had a website or wiki where the class could find important documents or could post in a discussion board. Even teachers who, like my AP Bio teacher, lectured using a PPT-like presentation made much better use of the technology: Slides had large text that was easy to read, they had pictures and maps to spice up the deck and they didn’t include every word they were going to say on the slide, only  important points that would serve as guideposts for students.

I think it’s important to make digital literacy one of my priorities as an English teacher. As Bomer says, 1) students may know more than us and be very accustomed to technology, but they don’t necessarily know how to approach technology critically and 2) not all students have the same level of access to technology, which makes it all more valuable to spend time working with it in the classroom.

At a very basic level, I think it would be useful to replicate some practices that I’ve seen in classroom so far, such as storing all syllabi, assignments and course materials in one place (like Blackboard) so that students have a reference point throughout the semester and can always find out when something is due or can catch up if they missed class. I also think it could be valuable to have students submit written work to me via Google Docs, so that I can make comments on their work and share it back with them easily (and then we could easily repeat that exercise as they made revisions).  As I said below in my film post, I think assigning students to create films can be effective and creatively-stimulating as long as I’m sure they have access to the requisite equipment, either through the school or at home. Also, learning to communicate is an important part of the English curriculum, which is why I might have students present various projects to their classmates using some sort of visual aid like PPT or Prezi. Learning how to construct an effective presentation is extremely valuable and one that will serve them in school and in the workplace.

Overall, I want to cultivate the habit of asking myself, “Can I incorporate some other media in this lesson or unit?” I want it to become instinctive to me to, say, pull up a relevant YouTube or movie clip that connects to something we’re reading, or have students watch a commercial in class and discuss how it was constructed and what impact it’s trying to make. In other words, I don’t want to shoehorn technology into my classroom, but rather make it a natural part of our English class.

Movie Clips – Freewrite

Pleasantville

(with sound)

I haven’t seen Pleasantville before so when I was watching this scene, because of the way it was initially cut, at first I thought Reese Witherspoon and Toby Maguire were the ones going on a date, instead of being siblings. It was pretty funny to see them both – when did this come out? I wonder how old they were in it. Also, wasn’t this movie in black and white? Maybe only parts of it where. This makes me think about playing movies in class-  will they be distracting or will they generate student interest?

(without sound)

First of all, since I couldn’t hear their conversation, it looks like they are on the phone with each other, not different people. Also, without the peppy jazz music, it felt weirdly like it could be a horror movie, especially during Toby Maguire’s scene when he’s look out the window at the person (his mom?) putting something in the trunk and he has shadows across him. This cast a sinister light on the rest of the scene, like you thought something might be coming for them –  Don Knotts??

Finding Forrester

(Okay, first of all – I love this movie!! But back to the writing process…) When it comes to academic writing, I can veer toward perfectionism, which means that I take a while to star writing until I have a really good idea of what I’m going to say. Once I start writing, though, I generally write fairly quickly, if I can avoid being distracted. It’s interesting – with school writing, we’re always cautioned not to star writing without a framework in mind, because then you might find yourself three pages in on a totally wrong track with nothing left to say. But I actually think typing something – usually for me it’s a brainstorming stream-of-consciousness in another document – can be really helpful in getting over that first bit of “writing paralysis.”

Film was never really a major part of my English classes in middle or high school. In fact, the only time I can remember watching movies in English was in 8th grade when we were reading Romeo and Juliet, and we watched Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet.

(Highlight of 8th grade English: Leo and Claire Danes in the 1996 R+J)

Even then, we didn’t talk about the film as a “text”: We were simply watching the movie in order to gain a better understanding of the plot and to give us an idea of how the play would look when performed.

My sister, however, is currently a senior at my old high school. After I graduated, a new English teacher came who then became the head of the English department. Because of his interest in Film Studies, film has become a major component in my sister’s English classes. This past summer, for example, my sister was given a list of novels paired with thematically-similar films to choose from as part of her summer assignment. Her class frequently watches films and clips and discuss film theory, camera angles, reasons why the director made certain decisions, etc. They also are sometimes assigned to make their own short films using the techniques they’ve discussed. Her teacher seems much more focused on digital/media literacy than my teachers were, and I certainly think this will help students both in school and out of school.

I love the idea that students may start to realize that they can apply the same literacy skills that they might use on a novel in English class on movies or other media that they encounter outside of an academic setting. In the same way that teaching literary theory can open students’ eyes to a wider set of perspectives, so too can digital theory equip them to be more critical of the media that they are constantly encountering throughout their days.

Lord Peter Wimsey / Marxist Reading

(Lord Peter)

I’ve decided to do a Marxist reading on a book from a series that I’ve been reading since mid-summer. Before I discuss the Marxist implications, I thought I’d do a bit of an overview of the series!

Dorothy Sayers wrote about 11 novels and multiple collections of short stories of mystery fiction featuring her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. As he is the second son of a duke, Lord Peter is not, of course, a detective by trade, but he took up the hobby after coming home shell-shocked from WWI, as a way to keep active and to use his keen intellect (which he also had used in military intelligence). Peter is thoroughly likeable, but he often puts up a front as an empty-headed aristocrat, in order to wheedle information out of suspects. He is a book-collector and an Oxford man and frequently intersperses his conversations with quotes from classic literature. All in all, he is an extremely engaging character, as are the other mainstays of the Wimsey books, including Peter’s friend in Scotland Yard, Detective Parker, his manservant/valet, Bunter, his relatives and, of course, accused murderess/mystery writer/love interest, Harriet Vane.

The novel I want to discuss through a Marxist lens is the novel called Murder Must Advertise, in which Peter goes undercover as a copywriter at an ad agency where another copywriter has just died under suspicious circumstances. Here, for the first time, the reader sees Peter working for his wages. Unlike other detectives, he’s never paid for his detective work (he doesn’t need to be) and often is merely tagging along or helping his friends at the Yard. There is a tension throughout the series between how Peter wants detection to be and how it actually is. What he would like is for each case to present a nice intellectual challenge to untangle – which it often does. What he does not want is for there to be consequences to untangling said challenge, namely, the trial, conviction and (this being the 20’s/30’s) hanging of a criminal. When Peter makes an offhand remark about the “game” of detection in an early novel in the series, Parker (of more humble origins) quickly replies that it isn’t a game at all, it’s a job. In the first novel, after Peter has helped catch a particularly ruthless murderer, he descends into a sort of sickness that parallels his post-war state, when he felt residual guilt for ordering men to their deaths.

What does all this mean? My question is: British fiction often deals more directly with class than American fiction, which suggests that it may be easier to pick out class bias, since it’s more explicit. Is that the case for the Wimsey books, and, in particular, Murder Must Advertise? Are we predisposed to be biased against those from a lower class than Peter, since Peter is so sympathetic, or are we biased against Peter’s class (as they are not always portrayed in the best light) and thus we see Peter as an exception rather than the rule? Does Peter have some sort of “noblesse oblige” to contribute to society in the best way he can, since he isn’t doing much else by way of occupation? Do we, as readers, excuse him when he oversteps normal boundaries, in the same way that people in the books do, simply because of his title?

As I said above, an interesting factor in Murder Must Advertise is that Peter spends most of the book working as a copywriter. Because of his intelligence and wit, he is actually quite skilled at it, but has no intentions of continuing once the murder is solved. The whole novel (Sayers had worked in advertising) also is quite cynical about the whole capitalist cycle in which advertisers essentially convince consumers that they need something, provide them that product (say, butter), and then turn around and provide them with another product (say, weight loss pill) that addresses a problem caused by the first product. Sayers, through Peter, makes an interesting comment that it isn’t enormously rich people who drive this consumer cycle, but rather your average working person, who needs to buy certain luxury items to escape the monotonous routines of their daily lives.

Also notable is the relationship between Parker (now Chief Inspector) and Peter’s sister, Mary. The two get engaged at the end of a previous novel and are now married with two young children. (It is implied in Strong Poison, when the two get engaged, that Peter especially wants the two to marry so as to “pave the way” for his own courtship of Harriet (who had been accused of murder and was certainly not an aristocrat either), in the eyes of his family.)  Parker had long had an inferiority complex regarding Mary, but Sayers addresses this problem in a very “American” way – that is, Mary essentially has her money put aside so that she receives each month the exact equivalent of Parker’s salary, so that they are equal on that footing.

It is revealed by the end of the novel that the murderer did what he did out of financial hardship. Essentially, he didn’t have enough money to provide for his wife, who was pregnant, and he couldn’t leave his job at the advertising agency (where he wasn’t paid very much) because he couldn’t risk being unemployed for any period of time. As a result, he agreed to a rather shady side venture that ended up putting him at risk of blackmail – at which point he opts for murder instead. As is often the case, Peter has genuine sympathy for his plight, especially the man’s fear that his family will be implicated the rest of their lives if he is convicted of murder. Peter, although unable to save the man, ultimately allows him to find a path that will protect his family from stigma.

So many of these mysteries (as with real life) revolve around money: Who inherits? Is there a will? Who’s next of kin? Etc. etc. Peter, who is, as I said, often sympathetic (even to a fault) with the criminals, will never find himself in quite so desperate a position. With this in mind, I examine my own life to see where I need to use my imagination and empathy to relate to people who are struggling with things I am not currently (or may not ever) encounter. I think that is a useful and rich exercise for anyone, including my students.