What follows is an email that I wrote tonight. Although the email needed to be no more than a simple "thank you" for answering a question, I (typically) took the opportunity to be a little bit more wordy than necessary. I started out how I usually start talking about school: complaining. Then it turned to reflection, which is going to be my theme for this week (I do well with short-term goals).
[Teaching Romeo & Juliet] is a bear for me. I don't like the time frame in which I have to teach it. I had a week of intro lessons, then two weeks of reading the play in class. We'll finish Act 3 by winter break. When we come back, we only have 8 days until finals. We're having to read the entire play in class (the books can't go home). With 42 minute class periods, that's just not enough time. I would like to do SO MUCH more with it, but at this rate I'm mostly just trying to make sure they can comprehend the text. Ugh.
Other units I'm doing right now: Anne Frank (considering expanding this to a mini-genocide unit after break...including Hotel Rwanda possibly), Writer's Workshop, random fillers in Communications which I've labeled our "interpersonal communication" unit, and reading A Christmas Carol with the 7th graders (they hate it...and, frankly, I didn't care much for them today either!). It's not all terrible, though.
Here are some of the joys/triumphs of the last few weeks:
- helping the 7th graders know the difference between its and it's...they're pros...I didn't even figure that out until college
- teaching "word choice" to the 7th graders...it was a LAST MINUTE lesson (I literally threw it together 30 minutes before class based on some overheads from the previous teacher)...it seemed crazy and haphazard at the time, but their next pieces of writing are a million times better because of it
- getting a disaffected, drugged out 9th grader to actually turn in an assignment and get an A on a quiz (forgetting the fact that she still has a dismal 30%)
- being able to laugh when said 9th grader and two of her friends skipped my class to HANG OUT IN THE HALLWAY RIGHT OUTSIDE MY DOOR. really? they had nothing better to do???
- watching students present their biggest speech yet in Communications and reflecting on how far they've come this semester
That's all for now :)
2 comments:
I'm glad you've posted again.
That does suck for Romeo and Juliet. I keep saying, if you had a little more freedom, things would go better.
The Anne Frank thing is interesting, and oddly enough I was on Second Life the other day and saw a really cool set up of Kristallnacht. As your person, you could walk around a city in Germany the day after with the broken windows. In some of the buildings they had recordings of Jewish survivors. They even had graffiti on the walls of buildings that you could move your mouse over and they would translate them from German to English. You could also walk through a synagogue and it explained some critical things that the Nazis destroyed to the Jewish faith AND it showed hiding places like in Anne Frank AND also explained how the Nazis were really good at making it look like it was the people of Germany doing these things, but in reality, it was just people in the Nazi party pretending to be regular people.
Oh! Also, This I Believe has a really good essay from Elie Wiesel. Here's the link: http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=41283&themelist=holocaust&yval=0&start=0
Thanks for the link! That's pretty cool about Second Life, too. I didn't realize that there were things like that on there.
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