All I know for sure is that I'll start teaching lessons regularly around the middle of January, right after students finish a unit on symbolism and Romanticism using The Scarlet Letter. The content I need to cover is as follows:
1.) A unit on Naturalism, with Ethan Frome as the central text.
2.) A unit on PSSA/SAT/AP test prep with The Great Gatsby as the central text.
3.) A research-paper writing unit in which students write the first draft of their senior research paper. The paper must be 8-10 pages, and should be on a "hot topic" in students' field.
4.) A unit on McCarthyism/Cold War Literature using The Crucible as the central text.
5.) A unit focused on A Separate Peace
6.) Students should be using the critical lenses that we've learned so far (Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Architypical) and should learn more (Formalist, New Historicist).
7.) Students have a vocabulary goal for the end of the year, so I need to incorporate frequent lessons building student vocabulary and vocabulary decoding skills.
8.) In my Reading Improvement class, I hope to introduce weekly "book talks" to help them with their independent reading book reports for next semester.
I'm working on ways to do these units creatively and well, but it's not as easy as one might think. Right now, I'm using winter break (what remains of it) to re-read the books I'll be using as central unit texts (The Scarlet Letter, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, and A Separate Peace). I'm really looking to think about critical lenses, as well as the vocabulary goals the students have, in planning each unit I'll be teaching, but I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, and what other texts I can bring in with each novel--probably only about two short stories/poems that are thematically related to the book topics, or are related as far as the time in which they were written.
For Ethan Frome, I think I want students to be thinking about the critical lenses they've learned so far (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism), but I also want to introduce them to Formalism and New Historicism. And though I think a Marxist of Feminist reading would fit well with the book, the resource I have provides materials/scaffolds only for Formalist, Feminist, and Mythological/Archetypical readings. I really wanted my students to think about labor, isolation, and modernity, and I was thinking of pairing it with Tillie Olson's "I Want you Women up North to Know," so students could see the labor behind modernization, and so they could read some American lit that represents a part of America other than that North of Pennsylvania (so far they've been pretty stuck in New England, and that won't be changing much in the upcoming semester). Although the time periods are different, it touches (perhaps, though perhaps I'm wrong...) on similar themes.
I was also thinking of pairing it with "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that was published closer to the same time as Ethan Frome and deals with some of the same themes of women and psychology or medicine. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," a women who apparently suffers from something akin to postpartum depression and is being subjected to the "rest cure" for "hysterical" women. It would be a good place to introduce students to the idea of hysteria, popular attitudes towards middle-class and upper-class women at the turn of the twentieth century, and the emphasis on the passivity of women; I might also use clips from Sweeney Todd, to show students a more modern interpretation to early-twentieth-century attitudes towards women/"madness." (The latter text has only just occurred to me, and, so, requires some more thought). Of course, which direction I go with the text/its fellow texts depends on what my goal for the unit is, and I suppose a student investigation of social class and modernity might wait until they're reading Gatsby, so an investigation of early-twentieth-century understandings of women and illness might be better suited for this text. Perhaps I can focus students on a feminist reading and hold off on other critical lenses until we read other texts?
As far as Gatsby is concerned, I'm sort of at a loss as to the direction I might take it. We're using the book and the accompanying resources in which the school district has invested to prepare students for the PSSA's and, in my case, the SAT's and the AP test. This means a heavy emphasis on using PSSA-modeled assessments. I'm frustrated by this, but I think I have a plan of attack. The materials we have provide PSSA-modeled assessments for each chapter, and a final assessment that is 100 questions long that students are to go through at the end of the book. My plan--if my MT agrees to it, of course--is to administer the first two chapter tests early (after students have read the first 2 chapters, of course), find the skills that students are not doing well with--vocabulary, inferences, etc--and teach lessons on those skills separately, test students intermittently, tracking their progress on each of the skills I'm targeting, and see how they improve. Then, I'll see if those improvements are reflected on the final assessment. I'm sure I can come up with some fun non-PSSA-test-question activities to help students build skills in decoding vocabulary, characterization, inferences, etc. I'd also like to have a unit focus other than "test prep," and I'd like to have students thinking about social class in a book that I think it's super important to deal with, but we'll see what happens with that...
For A Separate Peace, I won't be introducing the book, another teacher in the department will be introducing students to the text, so I'll have to be somewhat flexible, but I really want students to think about masculinity. Since we'll have spent so much time talking about Feminism and how women are depicted in American lit, it will be important and refreshing, I think, to investigate how men/boys are depicted and what social expectations for boys/men are/were. Not sure what texts to pair with this one yet...
As far as The Crucible, I haven't finished the play yet (I know, it's crazy that I've gone this long without reading it), but the resources I have for critical lenses suggest Feminist, Psychoanalytic, and Mythological/Archetypical (the same lenses they suggest for reading The Scarlet Letter, incidentally), and my MT says she typically reads the text allegorically, to think about McCarthyism. So I hope to do something fun with that. It's much later in the semester, and I probably won't be teaching it, so I haven't given it much thought yet.
What I'm really excited about is the role I'll get to play in students' research papers. They have no assigned topic except that they must research "a hot topic in their field," which I don't know that I care for, since, at 16, I didn't know what my "field" would be with any certainty, but I think it's meant to link to their senior projects. Anyways, I have tons of ideas for this unit (I wish I could just skip over Ethan Frome and just get students started on research right away!), but I'm still not sure about the cohesion of it all. I want to use the writing workshop type model, start students off journaling about possible topics, working with partners or small groups to select a topic, do research, compile a preliminary list of outside sources they might wish to use, which they'll turn in to me so I can guide their research to credible sources (I'll have a lesson, or at least a mini-lesson on distinguishing credible sources). Then I'll ask students to come up with some sort of organizational structure--sub-sections, an outline, an abstract, or something--then a rough draft which they'll peer-review in pairs or small groups, at which point I really want to hold individual writing conferences, and then a final draft. I'm still shaky on how well all of these steps will go, how much I'll have to prepare students for each step, etc, but I'm really excited to get started with it.
As for the vocabulary goal, I want to touch on it frequently--maybe weekly?--because I think it isn't separate from the unit goals I have for the books/texts students will be working with. I plan to start out by pulling vocabulary words that I think students will need to know from Ethan Frome, then asking students what the words mean, and going through the steps of determining the definition [prefixes, suffixes, roots, context clues, and, finally, if all else fails, the OED (Oxford English dictionary)], but I don't want to be the one continually responsible for finding the vocabulary words. I think it would be far more authentic if students brought in words they didn't know and talked us through how they determined the definitions. I want to make sure students actually do this, though, so I'll have to come up with some sort of accountability measure--points, a grade, etc--and I'll also have to pick out words for each chapter, as well, so that if students don't touch on a word, I can see if it's because they already know the word, or because they couldn't easily find the meaning, or just because they didn't get to it. I'm wondering how to do this most effectively--each student assigned a chapter? All students must find at least 1 or 2 words a chapter? Groups of students for each section?--but I think it'll be a good, unit-goal-related, effective strategy for teaching vocab (better than a worksheet, at least).
And as for the Reading Improvement students who I've hardly interacted with this semester (because my MT doesn't think they'll respond well to me, since they've bonded with her), I'll be starting out by introducing book talks. I plan on giving the first one, maybe asking my MT to give one, but I really want students to be center stage for this activity. This may not be easy, because the students have an independent reading assignment each 1/2 of the year, and many students didn't do their independent reading, or waited until the last possible minute to do it. Now, the students are struggling readers, so that certainly plays a part. But I know they read--we all do, in today's society, in one way or another. I just have to figure out how to get them talking about their reading.
I was thinking about starting out by giving a book talk about Maus or some graphic novel, so I can get students thinking about alternative texts and keep them from getting stuck in the "school reading" mindset. I don't know if I want to open up the option to talk about movies, in part because I already know they're watching movies, and they can write and talk about movies in other assignments, perhaps, but for the purposes of this activity, I want them thinking about reading written words. However, I was thinking about letting them use songs. I'd ask them to bring a written copy of the lyrics for me and all their peers, and then I'd let them play it (songs would have to be school-appropriate, of course) and talk about why they like it. I'd use this as a first step to getting them talking about texts they read and that are important to them, but then I'd ask them to also talk about books specifically in later book talks, I think--mainly because they can't do their independent reading book report on a movie or a song, but can do it on a literary book, YA book, or graphic novel.
Anyways, these are the ideas I'm working with for my upcoming units. If anyone has suggestions for how to teach vocab, test prep, or research skills effectively, or ideas for unit foci for the various books I'll be teaching, or ideas for texts that would pair well with these books, I'd really love to hear your ideas. If I've said anything that I want to try that you think absolutely WON'T work, I'd love to hear that, too, before I try it and it blows up in my face.
I think there will be a shift in my blog posts at this point. I'll still talk about theory and pedagogy, I imagine, but I'll also be a lot more concerned with my practice, how to make lessons/units work, how to adjust when they don't work, etc.
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