This year I started with a new resolve to have a general idea of what I was going to teach each quarter for the whole year. This makes planning day to day a lot easier and quicker. My husband is on deployment for this school year so it’s just me and my son, so the less time I have to spend planning, the more I can spend teaching and with my son.
Contemporary Literature
This year I’m teaching one of my favorite classes, Contemporary Literature. In this class I focus on novels that are young adult and usually written in the last 30 years or so. Most students tend to pay more attention when it’s a newer novel and easier to relate to. The first novel we are reading this school year is Monster by Walter Dean Myers. Although it is created for a lower grade level, most of my students have been through the justice system and can relate to the novel. Starting the school year with this novel also helps encourage participation because students who have read it before can chime in more and because it is more dialogue based, students take on parts to read aloud. This helps in building a classroom culture of students reading aloud so it is not on me all the time so when we move on to other novels they are more likely to continue to read aloud. Along with our theme of Justice and Stereotyping, we will be watching the Netflix Original show “When They See Us” and the second half of the quarter we will read Dopesick which is another Walter Dean Myers novel that deals more with Isolation.
English Techniques
This class is always hard for me to plan out for because I feel that it needs to be remedial focused, without making it obvious to students. Once students figure out the reason for them being in the class, they instantly become disinterested and most times discouraged. This first half of the quarter I decided to focus on all the basic concepts (Main Idea, Theme, Plot, etc) but do it in a rapid fire way so students feel the sense of review, without it being drawn out. From there we will move on quickly to reading the play The Laramie Project by the Tectonic Theatre Project. Like Monster, this is a great way to encourage participation. Students like reading the different roles and discussing hard topics like homophobia and murder. The story is gripping because so much of what happened 20 years ago, still happens today.
I’m excited for this year and to see what my students bring to the table.
Ms. V's Learning Journey 