Falling into School, Building Up to Teaching (Sept. 1-7)

The middle of last week saw us reviewing and strengthening the students’ understanding of literary terminology. Various handouts and inserts which they were to three hole punch and place in their binders for the class came into great use this week as they began to work on identifying various instances of these terms in poetry and prose.

This Tuesday following the Labor Day weekend, students began working with imagery and symbolism in conjunction with their introduction to Modernism as a movement in literature between 1914 and 1939. Tuesday was a lecture day in which the teacher used Cornell notes in class to give the students some historical background on the movement as well as some singular aspects that identify a work as being quintessentially “modern.”

Incidentally, this week saw an increase in my involvement in planning for the class. Mrs. T has given me the task of introducing bellwork and I began Tuesday’s introduction of Modernism with a pre-writing exercise. My three questions were simple. “What does the word ‘Modern; mean to you?” “What is ‘Modernism’ ?” and “The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men are often referred to as ‘Modern Novels.’ What does that tell you about them?

 Wednesday (today), was slightly more interesting as I walked in to find a substitute teacher who was more than willing to let me run the class from start to finish. As the bellwork assignment was on a flash drive and I have not been made familiar about how to operate the smart board, I decided to hand out the main assignment at the door as I welcomed the students.

The assignment was a packet of poetry (Shel Silverstein, Ezra pound, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, and others). I instructed the students to use their previous handouts identifying literary terminology and multicolored highlighters to make a key at the front of the packet and to go through highlighting examples of the various figurative language in each poem. (EXAMPLE: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS DESCRIBES A RED WHEEL BARROW IN SUCH A WAY AS YOU SEE IT AS AN IMAGE IN YOUR MIND’S EYE. IF YOU ASIGN THE COLOR RED TO IMAGERY YOU CAN HIGHLIGHT THE “RED WHEEL BARROW.”)

This was a fun class in that I had absolutely no control and almost sole authority. The substitute did a lot of runs to the office to check on things for the next class. I will say that nobody was hurt and that I only had to raise my voice three times to return the volume level to one that was more manageable. Some students seemed to struggle with the assignment while others seemed to zip through it rather quickly in order to use the last 20 minutes of class for discussion of various topics unrelated to class.

In retrospect, I think I should open future classes with the brief description of the assignment and then offer the last ten minutes of class as a reward for the first 40 minutes spent working diligently and quietly in small groups. I take responsibility for the rather disorganized chaos of today in that I should have had a better idea in mind of structure before I began.

But, on the brighter side, I’m looking forward on working with my CT on teaching the upcoming unit on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The students will spend this week on poetry, the next week on short stories in the Modernist Tradition, and then they will begin reading and taking daily reading quizzes on the novel.

I’m excited and yet still a bit nervous. My CT is a good example and today I realized just how effective her persona alone is in keeping the classroom in order.