Digesting

So after a long lunch and a day to really think about the lesson plan and how it went, I thought I'd post my findings here.

On the whole I would say the lesson went quite well. Having to do two pieces of writing caught the students a bit by surprise and some had thought it was actually due for homework, but most seemed to appreciate that the second piece of writing was more laid back - in a way at least. It wasn't asking the students to process the story, just take a character you already like and already know about and let me know why this character is your favorite and use some of today's terminology about him or her or it.

I had two Holden Caufields, a Frodo Baggins, a Bilbo Baggins, a few from more esoteric books like One Hundred Years of Solitute and Love in the Times of Cholera, but also I had one person say God. One person also said Arya Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire while another said Rorschach from Watchmen. I got a little nerdy on that last one.

The students were engaged with the discussion and I think they both got a lot out of it and also had a good deal of say in how things went. I also gave the students a vocabulary quiz, which they were allowed to use their texts on. I took the vocab. words, which they typically only dealt with in a rather detached way and applied them to our reading in eleven or so sentences summarizing aspects of the reading. while on the whole results were mixed, I did hear some positive comments that the words felt more challenging in this context and it was also nice to see some of them used.

The downside was that I just overestimated how long things would take by a mile. Instead of taking forty minutes for discussion, we spend about 20. Thankfully one of Mrs. N's assignments had been left undone from the previous day, and so they could work on that and then silent reading, but I think until I get a better sense of timing I need to over-plan my lessons rather than under-plan them.

I'll be doing another lesson for the same class next week on poetry, examining Michelle T. Clinton's "The Shape of Mythic Lies." I'm excited to see how the students respond to this poem, particularly in light of many examples and parallels being drawn to the Garden of Eden mythology in their current texts.