I Can't Include the Word "Summer" In Another Post...But I Want To

I'm getting really excited for school to start. I've been working at a local theatre, and one of the guys I work with is also a teacher. He's young, dorky and enthusiastic like me, but he's SO over teaching. He's on his third year and says he was naive and happy just like me after his first and now he's borderline quitting. Dear Lord, please don't ever let me feel that way. My role as a teacher has completely merged into my identity (in fact, it's not a role so much anymore) and I love that. I don't ever want to be the burnt-out third year, ten year, tenure teacher. I hope that's not my path. 

Anyway...I've been prepping a lot lately for my junior class, and I can't wait to see how things go. For the first trimester I'm teaching freshmen, who I love, but the junior course is really the highlight of my year. I have to wait for a third of the year to finish before I teach it, and I'm really hoping my enthusiasm for the course hasn't subsided on day sixty of the school year. Only time will tell. 

I've come to the conclusion that at this point in my life I have two goals for my students: first, to rekindle their innate curiosity for life and learning. Actually, that's one goal. But I think that encouraging them to travel and see the world beyond their limited town walls directly affects their success of achieving that goal. So I've come up with a new warm-up activity to replace the grammar warm up for juniors (I'm hoping I've drilled it in enough freshman year that we'll having something to work with  so that I don't need to rehash the difference between "there," "they're" and "their" for seven straight classes in a row). My only goal is to help pique their interest in the world beyond Massachusetts and hopefully their interest in exciting, unfamiliar, and new (to them and me) cultures. 

I'm calling it Where In the World Is Miss Rasselas? Each Monday I'll show them a picture of some place I've been to abroad. Then on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I'll give them small one-word clues. For instance, if the picture was of the Aran Islands, Tuesday's clue would be "fish," Wednesday's clue would be "curragh," and Thursday's clue would be "Liam O'Flaherty." They must put their guesses in my Where-In-the-World-Is-Miss-Rasselas box by Friday at 2:15. Monday morning I'll reach into the box and pick (actually, I'll place that burden on students) a winner from all the correct answers. Five bonus points (one homework assignment) will be awarded to the winner. By the way (English teachers have this weird habit of spelling words out), I'm no longer a believer in free homework passes, but that's a blog for another day. I'm hoping this will get them looking online to learn things about the world. I'll award an additional bonus point to a student who can answer a question about the place that they would most likely know from doing the research during the week. Hopefully this will encourage them to think of the world beyond what they can see now. I guess I'll find out if it works. Last year I found that students love seeing my pictures from traveling. I'm just hoping to plant some seeds.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with Macbeth. I'm not going to lie--Macbeth is hard for me. Well, Shakespeare is hard for me. I like to spend a lot of time with the Bard's work and mull it over a great deal. In a sixty-day course I don't have a lot of time to teach two texts (Le Morte D'Arthur and Macbeth) and teach students the joys of mulling. I can't wait for five years down the educational yellow brick road when I've figured out how to teach Shakespeare half decently. 

This year I've divided my course into two parts. With Le Morte we are going to focus on literature and the community and with Macbeth we are going to focus on literature and the individual. I'm looking forward to emphasizing the reader-response theory with Macbeth. I want Macbeth to mean something to them, reveal something about themselves to them. I'm thinking I might ask them to keep a Macbeth journal. For each scene they will need to pick out one passage and explain what it means to them and write a page or so on it. I'm hoping this will foster some interesting discussion and close analysis, but I'm afraid they'll get bored with the repetitiveness of a journal and the textual work. I'm a big ideas person, and my students respond well to that. I'm afraid I won't be able to hack it with the other approach. Most of these kids get ecstatic about applying to the local state college. Actually, the few that go to college get excited about the local state college and the majority have no idea what they are doing after school. I want them to see Macbeth (any piece of classic literature really) as a tool for self discovery. I'm just having a bit of trouble trying to figure it all out. I already know not to focus on plot details, but with a limited amount of time and a new teacher at the steering wheel, do we go big or go close-reading home? At this point in my career, it seems extremely difficult to do both well and simultaneously.  Ooo...this is a teaching crossroad for sure. Which way to turn? Which way to go? Scary. Empowering. Exciting. I can't wait for school to start.*

*See blog entry in two months entitled "What the Hell Was I Thinking?"