It Only Took Twenty-Five Short Years

I have a new guru--my mom. She's amazing. I don't where to begin. She teaches first grade, which is so different than teaching high school. But her insights to teaching are so authentic, experienced and inspiring. I spent the whole first twenty-four years of my life trying to be something different than both of my parents.  I wanted to be my own person. But the more time  spend with my mom the more I realize she is the inspiration for the person, the teacher, I am now. She's in her late fifties (I'm sorry for putting that out there Mom), but she's not jaded. Despite it all, she laughs, she loves and she teaches. She knows so much--all the various movements of the last thirty years and can describe them in first-person detail. She's been there through it all. It's like listening to a history book that speaks aloud with fire and reflection. Thanks Mom. I'm sorry that it took me so long to realize that trying to not be like you was a fruitless effort. These day I want to be just like you.

The Rain In Spain Falls Mainly on the Plains...I Think I've Got It...

Alright, I've been brainstorming all day about how to do my Macbeth unit because I knew I couldn't rely on journals alone to make capture my students' interest in Shakespeare.  I was having visions of a repeat from last year while lying in bed last night, so today I planned away. Here's the plan:

I'm going to introduce Macbeth using a music simile. The objective of the lesson will be to have students make the connection that a Shakespearean play is just like a classic, top-twenty-five song of all time. We'll talk about how people cover these songs (like a performance of a Shakespearean play) and people also adapt the songs like Puffy did with the song "With Every Breath You Take" (like an adaptation of a Shakespearean play). This music simile will guide the rest of the unit. 

I've created a Macbeth Unplugged blog that will serve as the journals I was originally thinking about having the students write in. All homework assignments will be on the blog and depending on what we've read in class they will have to "cover," "adapt," "choose a song," or "choose an singer" for a selection from the text. I'll start off posting the selections, but I'm hoping as they get used to the format they will eventually choose their own to post. 

I hoping this will encourage the close reading that I was having trouble incorporating, get them to think about the decisions Shakespeare made and how the literary devices add to the meaning and complexity of the text, and allow them to think about what captures their individual attention in the text. I'm also hoping it will add a little competitive edge to the discussions, and students engage with the text so they are not "copying" the ideas of their peers.

After we have finished reading the play, students will review everything they wrote in the blog and look for patterns in their thinking. This will be the self-reflective part that helps them see the influence of literature on understanding themselves as individuals better. Here is where the literature will become the tool for self discovery.

During the unit we will look at different "covers" and an adaptation of Macbeth (The BBC's Shakespeare Retold, which is awesome by the way!), and their final paper will be to write a proposal for a Macbeth production to submit to the theatre I'm working at now. They can use the self-reflection part mentioned earlier to come up with a unifying concept for their production. I'm hoping that if I bring up the idea to the woman I work for, who happens to have a soft spot for teachers, something may come of this. Imagine if I could get the artistic director to read their submissions and select one! That would be amazing!

And the icing on the blogilicious cake--minimal correcting!!

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?"