I love, love, love teaching the African-American spirituals. My students do a mini-research webquest to learn about key abolitionists, different routes of the Underground Railroad (which they draw and color-code on a map), secret messages in the spirituals themselves, and quilt codes that slaves used as another means of communicating secret messages. They fill in their webquest packets as they learn all of this. I even have MP3's of various spirituals in my folder on the school's network so they can all hear the different spirituals we study. (Some of them sing the spirituals for days afterward, which is always cute!). At the end of the project, each student must make his/her own quilt square out of construction paper of one of the slave codes they studied. When they bring them in, I display them all on the wall for our own "quilt," as a reminder of what we learned.
I use Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to teach elements of Realism like regional culture/dialect, racism vs. social progress, the affect of society and environment on an individual, and illusion vs. reality; but I don't especially enjoy teaching them. Those are the works we are studying right now. I'm taking a break from the literature, though, to show my students the film Glory (one of my all-time favorites), during which they must take notes on examples from the movie of the 7 different characteristics of Realism that we've been studying. As we read The Red Badge of Courage, it became clear that my students (all immigrants) have almost no background knowledge of the American Civil War (save what they learned and actually remember from their U.S. History class). I'm hoping that this film will help to bridge the gap. Next year, I may show it before we read the story.
What I am REALLY looking foward to is teaching Dunbar's poetry. I do a lot with his poem "We Wear the Mask," and I always have my students write their own "I Wear a Mask" poems. From there, we will jump forward a bit and begin our study of the Harlem Renaissance! Just as I was so excited to NOT have Benchmark Exams for my SOPH LA class, the same is true of my JR LA class. This year, I will actually have the time to teach A Rasin in the Sun during our Harlem Renaissance unit. I've never taught it, so it's going to add some pressure on me, but I think it will be well worth it. :)
A note about my SOPH LA class: we're finishing reading Julius Caesar this week. Then, we'll have 2 weeks of a test, a project, an essay, and (maybe) a film. After that, it will be time for Dante's Inferno, which I've also never taught before. I want to do an intro webquest project so the students can learn about the set-up of hell before we actually start reading the Cantos. More work, I know, but very exciting!
Funny Moment Today:
After a brief discussion about examples of figurative language (simile, hyperbole, metaphor, etc.), we moved on to the concept of diction. I explained that diction simply meant "word choice." A young man, Alan, raised his hand and said he still didn't understand.
"Well," I said. "Remember, to be persuasive, you must choose strong, direct words. You must also choose words to most effectively communicate your message. For instance, rather than saying, 'Alan is a good student,' I should say something like, 'Alan is an intelligent and focused student."
"Oh, Miss! I know!" A shout came from the other side of the room. "That's hyperbole!" :)
...It's a good day when students make literary device jokes.
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