This is an area for Chris Proctor's curriculum work. If you're looking for the Westlake Curriculum Unit area, head over here.
Here's a direct link to this spreadsheet. (This is what actually happened. It may be interesting to compare this to the curriculum we planned at the beginning of the year.)
The English II Pre-AP World Literature course will be a sustained inquiry into one question: How do I approach the Other? As we encounter new people, places, and ideas in this course, we will seek to understand the conditions and context by which we make sense of them.
These are important questions to be asking at this time and place. In a study of world literature, we will encounter people, places, and situations which are very different from our own experience. During these encounters, we wil pay particular attention to how we make new experiences meaningful and the conditions under which we can be open to them. As young adolescents, our students are actively defining the boundaries of their own identities.
This essential question will reappear in every unit of study:
I'd like to work toward having more explicitly laid out units, so that we could engage in meaningful revision from year to year. This will also provide me with more freedom to improvise individual lessons; when I have a clear picture of where we're headed, I can make informed on-the-spot decisions based on what happens in class. If curriculum is to be shared, standardized components will be necessary; I will use Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe) as my model.
This being my first year teaching the English II Pre-AP curriculum, I'll be making discoveries as I go, so the curriculum I set down here will be more in the mode of "I wish I'd done it this way."
The medium for these thoughts -- this website -- is a barrier to collaborative practice, as I'm the only one who can post! I haven't found a better medium yet, which is a problem. The practice of creating units, lessons, handouts, and assessments as static files which are emailed around or posted to a shared folder is tedious and cumbersome, and leads to version-control problems. A wiki-like structure, on the other hand, does not allow for sufficient authorial control. Each teacher will, in the end, need a unique branch of the unit to tailor to his or her personal style and strengths. I'm working on a website that will provide easy collaboration, document-grouping, version control, and other workflows, while reinforcing best practices instead of making us work toward best practices in spite of the tools we have available (why are we giving our students percent grades again?)
I need to be embedding grammar instruction into my units. Top grammatical issues:
--Use of semicolons
--Comma splices / incomplete sentences
--Nonrestrictive clauses without commas
--Casual constructions: "ironic" quotation marks, etc,
--Agreement (When a student goes home, they take a nap.)
I'd like the school year to have an introduction and a conclusion, where we anticipate all the questions we will ask and then assess what we have learned. I'm wondering whether Plato's dialogues might be a good place to start--they are approachable, yet they bring up all the essential questions we ask over the year. Perhaps the two semesters could have a type/antitype relationship as well, focusing on classical source material from various traditions in the first semester, and their modern reinterpretations in the second semester.
I didn't pay enough attention to the writing process or to creating an environment conducive to writing this year. Large classes and short grading periods are challenges to these goals.
Rather than dedicate one unit to poetry, I'd like to weave poetry into all the units.
I want to make the structure of my curriculum, and my reasons for teaching the way I teach more transparent to students and to parents. I need a much more substantial letter home at the beginning of the year, and perhaps a letter at the beginning of each unit as well.
09-10
The great challenge we ask of students in this unit is to link something foreign and distant in many ways with their own lives. Barring students who have lived through physically traumatizing circumstances, the commonality is to be found in emotional truths -- how we connect with our past, how we savor the innocence of childhood, how music affects us.
Too many of my students' responses are superficial, struggling to grasp an experience that feels unapproachable. Next year, I'd like to explicitly teach text/subtext, and how to make inferences about characters based on their actions. I'd also like to supplement this text with excerpts that show us other characters in different but similarly foreign situations, so that we can practice linking our emotional truths to theirs, or to realize what we take for granted by coming to an understanding of what others have lost. I explore the value of teaching empathetic reading here.
Need to teach narrowing a thesis
I'd like to use this initial opportunity to focus on audience: who is reading these essays, and what assumptions are they making. This relates to a larger question I have been considering: What is the audience for my students' papers? If I can build a more trusting space in class, I would like to establish the norm that students are writing for each other. Perhaps I can achieve this via the blogs.
This should also be a time to discuss the idea of genre: comparing critiques with analyses, and identifying the expectations of each. This is a way to make sure our expectations are aligned for academic writing. Focus on actually writing summary as a way of refining prose.
09-10
As I've been teaching this unit, a structure has suggested itself to me: Part I focuses on the relationship between myth and culture, arguing that we are to some degree shaped by myth. Core texts are Star Wars and Campbell. Then, Part II shows how a culture's oldest myths have a disproportionate effect on the culture. We focus on the Odyssey, and use Atwood's Penelopiad and Walcott's Omeros to show how the Odyssey still pulls cultural weight today and how myths can be retold to change their meanings. Finally, Part III focuses on how myth can be political. We read a selection of Aztec and Mayan myths and then read Moraga's poem, a Chicana protest of social inequity by recasting our society through the lens of Aztec myth.
The film project didn't really fit into my unit this year. That's the way it goes.
Interesting possibilities for close reading, writing summaries, thematic focus.
09-10
I used A Portrait of the Artist as an into text, exploring how Joyce shows us what it's like to be a boy. This was moderately effective, though it worked much better with quite a bit of context. This text is obviously significant as an antecedent to Safran Foer, but I'd like to find a different example that didn't also require students to bridge a cultural and temporal gap, wondering about prefects and soutanes.
I didn't discuss critical theory directly here, but I think it would work well next year. Already, I have students bristling at the prospect of being told the essay is not about their experience. In the past, it has been valuable and satisfying to students to tackle head-on the epistemological questions of where meaning is situated. I have materials for a structured academic controversy between New Criticism and Reader-Response theory.
Next year, I need to restrict the list of elements available as options for wiki pages and for choices on the essay. We should also practice analysis with a simpler text: Scarlet Ibis? Yellow Wallpaper? We also need to work our way up Bloom's taxonomy, critiquing other papers before writing our own. While we did this this year, it was only rubric-based, instead of giving specific feedback.
09-10
My unit this year was almost violently dialectical -- we started with a week of contemporary essays, focusing on voice, the inner world, and the concept that an essay models thought. Then we jumped back to Inferno and focused on the medieval mindset in Inferno -- abstract, theological, and objective. We then skipped forward and examined some of Petrarch's love poetry, focusing on Petrarch's humanism, his concern for individual experience, and the way he holds open an inner world by leaving room for the reader's interpretation. We contrasted this with Dante's love poetry, noting the absence of an humanist orientation.
I felt this strategy was effective in that it makes the difference between the medieval mindset and the early modern mindset -- almost ineffable to a still self-absorbed 10th grader -- more tangible by beginning with the extreme contrast between Medieval and Modern. With the target thus bounded, we can zoom in on a comparison of Dante's and Petrarch's love poetry, which might not have seemed within reach before.
This approach, however, risks cognitive whiplash. I don't have a good sense of how many of my students were able to put the separate components into contrast. I know that questions have been left hanging -- why did we read all those essays last week, and start Inferno this week? I'm afraid that for some of my students, all this has left them unsure of what they should be thinking about as they read. This is a unit-planning question I have wondered about before: To what extent should a unit have a narrative arc, and to what extent should it lay out everything at the beginning? I think it is important for students to be making the connections, but some students do need to be given a big-picture roadmap.
Next year, I'd like to keep the structure of the unit, but make it more clear from the outset. Perhaps a diagram that puts all the components into context. I need better, and finer-gran assessments, so I can make sure everybody is following every step of the way (My slow turnaround this year gets in the way too).
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I am very attracted to the idea of combining a research paper with an essay. I'm worried that some of my students' essays for this unit will need research anyway. In a recent English Journal issue on research, I remember a very exciting article on research-based creative writing. Of course, this wouldn't be possible given the current layout of the sophomore curriculum. Something to bring up.
Many of my students report they did not understand why we were reading essays. Maybe this needs to split off as a separate unit.
The way I focused on allegory at the very end was powerful. Next year, prioritize illustration (and acting out) of allegories. Do matching tableaux for aesop's fables, perhaps even connected with strings.
At the end of the unit, explore different cultures' representations of the divide between the human and the epic, the divide between the temporal and the perfect, the divide between the limited and the divine. Other examples: Landscape painting (Moran) beautiful, sublime. Melville, mask of God. I Corinthians.
There are also interesting skills required in this MIT course overview. Focus on close reading? Focus on summary?
Several diagrams were particularly helpful: We drew stories above a line, and then mapped the stories to their meanings as a way of illustrating allegory. We also drew a T chart comparing the medieval thinker to the early modern thinker, and then explored which traits on both sides describe Dante.
Background knowledge. The Literature Workshop, Chapter 4 discusses background knowledge, and it made me realize that it's probably unfair to ask my students to be able to make much of the difference between Dante and Petrarch without quite a bit more context than I offered. I'll have to address this gap somehow in the future.
Early modern poetry is very interested in the conceit. Focus on one set of field-specific imagery (navigation, commerce, typography), learn the jargon, and explore how it is used by Shakespeare, Donne, & co. Then define a set of field-specific jargon for today and write sonnets with conceits.
Was the test an effective assessment of student comprehension of the play? Maybe not. My intention was to allow students to demonstrate what they understood, not try to catch them in what they didn't know. But I may have allowed too much choice; some students told me they felt they could have done a good job on the test with only a loose understanding of the play.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Handout 5.1.pdf | 30.54 KB |
| Handout 5.3.pdf | 92.99 KB |
| handout 5.6.pdf | 64.53 KB |
| handout 5.7.pdf | 146.93 KB |
| handout 5.8.docx | 29.67 KB |
| handout 5.9.pdf | 48.39 KB |
| handout 5.11.pdf | 163.18 KB |
| Handout 5.12.pdf | 62.86 KB |
| Handout 5.13.1.doc | 48 KB |
| Handout 5.13.2.doc | 39.5 KB |
| Handout 5.13.3.doc | 42.5 KB |
| Handout 5.13.4.doc | 43.5 KB |
Dear Students, Welcome to English II Pre-AP! One of the primary concerns of this course is the world around us, and how we make sense of it. While we will study literature from many eras, we will begin by thinking about modern issues in the world around us. To aid us in this process, we will begin by reading a memoir about one boy’s experiences in war-torn Sierra Leone during the 1990s. (A memoir is a kind of nonfiction in which an author tells stories from his or her life.) Here is your assignment:
Assessment These journal entries will count as a significant grade for the first six weeks of school. You are welcome to read with friends and discuss the book, but you should choose passages and write journal responses on your own. If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email--we'll be all over the country this summer, but we'll probably get back to you within a week. Sophomore year is going to be great. -Kristy Robins, John Campbell, Jon Watson, and Chris Proctor krobins@eanesisd.net jcampbell@eanesisd.net jwatson2@eanesisd.net cproctor@eanesisd.net
This is a model of what your journal might look like if you were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Thanks to the Junior AP teachers for creating this model.
| Quotations | Response |
| “Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work” (8-9). “‘Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em. No,’ my father mused, ‘you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t. Scout’s got to learn to keep her head and learn soon, with what’s in store for her these next few months’” (87). “‘I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it’” (203). | One theme present in To Kill a Mockingbird underlies many of the relationships in the book: a theme of stereotypying others based on some label. In the first excerpt, Boo Radley is identified as a “malevolent phantom” because people cannot understand his difference from them, his lack of social contact. In the second excerpt, Jack assumes that because Scout is a child, she must be dealt with in a certain way, and Atticus, although recognizing that Scout is a child, realizes that bigger issues are involved than just her use of language. In the third excerpt, Atticus speaks in the courtroom about the “codes” of their society, codes that keep Mayella Ewell from being able to deal honestly with her feelings for Tom Robinson, and that allow a group of jurors to convict Tom even though he committed no crime. All of these examples point to the idea that often our judgments of people are based on stereotypes rather than on actually understanding people’s individual motivations and actions. Although it would be nice to believe that such judgments are a thing of the past (a time such as the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird), the reality is that these same kinds of stereotypes and judgments happen today as well when we think that just because a person lives in a certain part of the city or just because a person has a certain ethnic background, he must be a certain type of person. How different the world might be if, instead of assessing a person’s worth based on whether he is unlike us in demeanor, age, wealth, race, or some other way, we got to know people and tried to understand who they are. This seems to me to be a major theme of this novel because, as Atticus says, we must and we can learn to walk around in another’s skin, to look at the world through another’s eyes, if only we take time to learn about them before we begin to make judgments about their worth or their views. |
What are we trying to do in the beginning of the year?
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Summer Reading 10-11.doc | 36.5 KB |