English Teacher Reinvents Wheel

One of my colleagues in the Middle School English Department said last year, around late October, "I feel like I have to teach everything at once!" Figuring out unfamiliar words, learning terms, decoding complex sentences, using quotations to support ideas, finding structure -- everything intertwines. Another colleague years ago told me that she imagines English class as an immense clock: the first weeks of each year, she struggles to get all the inter-connected cogs moving in sync.

That's how it's been this year. My lesson plans grew to be ridiculously long and involved, even for the first class meetings, one-half hour each.  They got worse as I made mid-course corrections daily. But I should be an expert on this, by now.  Every year, I reinvent the wheel because I feel that the year depends on getting some concepts and procedures across early, and because I also feel like I'm cramming way too much into our first weeks.

Here's what I think I've done during these first weeks of school. Maybe this will help me begin next year.

First day, I invited the students up to two white boards labeled "fact" and "fiction."  What words do they know that relate to the root fact, fect, fict, fice, -fy?  They all have to do with "making" -- whether made solid, or made up.  We call literature "fiction," and history "fact," but even fantasies are anchored in real life behavior, and historians use their imaginations to probe motives and decisions.   This demonstrated for the first of many times how a knowledge of words' origins can help us to understand their meanings and connections at a deeper level. Besides, "Fiction adds to our store of experience."

Second Day, I brought in plastic bins of drama props and costumes, one for each third of the class. The challenge was for each person to choose props they liked. Then, I challenged each group to contribute to an improvised story involving themselves and their chosen objects.  It was fun to dig past the things on top, exhilarating to imagine connections between unrelated objects. [Photos: Thinking literally "out of the box."]

We used "unpacking the box" as a metaphor to explain writing.  The kids are "unpacking" their experiences, looking for "Aha!" moments.  This ties in with the summer reading, for which they were told to mark "Aha!" moments, repeated actions, etc. etc.

Mondays, I've given a series of short lessons called "Parts and Recreation."  Six parts of speech appear in a text they know by heart, "The Pledge of Allegiance," making it a good review.  Then I had everyone put their hands on an object in the room, all nouns; then I challenged them to use the noun as a verb or an adjective (a chair; to chair a meeting; a chair cushion).  So parts of speech may play different parts in a sentence.  (Thus I prepare them for verbals and adjective pronouns).

I asked students to make a display for parents' night by taking a selfie, taking a photo of a favorite object, and joining subject and object with a caption.  We had those objects either as "direct objects" or "objects of prepositions" ("I hug my dog" v. "I play fetch with my dog").  Next week, I plan to get into different kinds of phrases by challenging them to use phrases to add background info to those simple sentences with phrases that answer who? where? when? why? how?

I took time at the start of each class of that first week to read strategically chosen bits of The Pearl.  We saw the fisherman Kino as a "killing machine" in an action-packed finale to the novel; we saw his anger at being shamed at the doctor's front gate, early in the book;  we read carefully the scene when the doctor claims to be curing the baby, when he's actually causing the symptoms. Kids saw immediately that Kino hasn't exactly "changed" into a killing machine: the anger and violence were latent at the start.  Kids who told me they were bored by the book were excited by these passages when I read them, and I promised to teach them how to appreciate what they read the way I do.

I brought out a jump rope and clothes pins.  We "plotted" the readings I'd done, to see how the protagonist's decisions move the story forward to its climax. In each class, a volunteer protagonist (from pro- forward, agon conflict) struggled past classmates' obstacles to get back from me an object I grabbed from their desk.

The next day, I brought out three more ropes and clothespins, having the kids trace parallel developments in character development of Kino's wife Juana; in a theme of Kino's being exploited by the privileged people of European descent; and in the descriptions of the pearl itself - lovely at first, monstrous and ugly near the end.

This week, I'll ask the kids to write about two "Aha" moments of their choice from The Pearl, to show that these either do or do not tie in with at least two of the four "jump rope" strands that we traced through the book -- plot, character development, theme, or development of a symbol.  (I've not been able to follow through on a scheme to have groups challenge each other with passages that they feel serve only one purpose or less. One boy was highly motivated to prove that passages in the book were useless and boring.)

Looking back, I see interconnections.  But I wonder if the students see all this as just one darn thing after another?