Unexpected Lessons!

So today featured a rather unexpected twist. Mrs. C, my cooperating teacher with the freshmen, had to leave early because of a family situation. After a small amount of negotiation, she discovered there were no subs available and so it fell to me to teach the class.

Now this isn't a huge and terrifying thing, since I was planning to begin solo-teaching starting this coming Monday, but this was very different. I realized as I went to the front of the room that I was armed with two note cards, my journal and a book. No big plans, no clue of what I wanted to accomplish, etc. And so, I set out to do the best I could on short notice.

Where the lesson really shined for me was in a discussion about the "Ladies Missionary Society of Maycomb County" in To Kill a Mockingbird. The society is frankly full of hypocrites - who are happy to claim to help the Mrunas tribe in Africa, but speak ill of them and are particularly loathsome to the African Americans in their own hometown.

We got a great conversation about the definition of hypocrisy and that it requires more than just lying, that it really takes turning the behavior back on someone. As one student put it, it'd be like if I told him he couldn't put his elbows on the desk, then asked how he was doing with my elbows on his desk. I liked that analogy.

We then got into a fascinating discussion about whether or not these ladies meant to be racists or not. Were they even aware that when they said things like "Darkie" that there were being racist or were they totally oblivious to this? I talked a bit about the idea of institutionalized racism - a form of racism that is so entrenched within our culture that we don't even recognize it for what it is.

I then asked, by show of hands, if anyone had ever said the phrased "gypped." More than three quarters of the hands in the room went up, as I'd expected. I then asked if anyone knew where the term had come from, and one student answered "Doesn't it come from gypsies?" Eyes lit up and you could see the wheels turning as students made the connection. I then said that it was a really racist term, but it had worked its way into our society such that nobody recognized it for what it is.

I let the conversation get a little off-task at this point and we spoke a bit about gypsies, now called the Romani or Roma, and one student claimed that there were no more Roma. I corrected that, explaining that they still wandered Europe and some of Asia, and we even had some people here in the U.S. who were Roma. We then made some vocabulary connections, including the idea of wandering from place to place with the word vagabond (not a necessarily negative connection either).

We were then to discuss Chapters 25-27, which features Bob Ewell's slow but steady revenge. I didn't entirely know the points Mrs. C wanted to cover, and so I did my best on short notice to find them. I tried to make the students call up as many points as possible and we covered three major points she'd mentioned: Judge Taylor being stalked at night and someone almost breaking into his house; Helen Robinson, the wife of Tom, being heckled by Bob Ewell until Mr. Link Dees stood up to him, and a teacher proclaiming the Nazis were evil and awful because of their treatment of the Jews but herself being glad an innocent African American man had been sentenced to death.

After that we did a read along, where almost the entire class chose not to read. While a bit annoying, I let it slide. Things got rowdy once we finished the first chapter of two, but I raised my voice and stressed that whatever we didn't finish in class was homework. We managed to push things back onto track and finish up the chapter.

On Monday we'll be watching the film version of the book. It should hopefully be relaxed and easy-going, and I'm looking forward to it.