Essential questions

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:

1. How can we connect with experiences that are foreign to us?
   • Setting norms and building a community of writers with A Long Way Gone
2. How does mythology guide and shape us?
   • Archetype and allusion with Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, The Odyssey, Derek Walcott's Odyssey, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, Mesoamerican myths, and poetry by Xeri Moraga.
3. What is the relationship between parts and wholes?
   • Literary analysis with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
4. What goes on in our inner worlds?
   • Allegory and voice with Dante's Inferno and essays from today.
5. What is the relationship between words and meaning?
   • Interpretation through performance with Shakespeare's Othello.
6. Who am I as a reader?
   • Critical lenses with Nineteen Eighty Four and a choice novel.
7. What is the relationship between technology and freedom?
   • Research and credibility with Nineteen Eighty Four and a major research paper.
8. What can we learn about our culture from our advertising?
   • Rhetorical analysis and media literacy with today's advertisements.
9. How is style an expression of self?
   • Close reading and syntax with Catcher in the Rye.

Yearlong Curricular Goals

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?)

Curricular Revision Goals

Grammar

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.)

Essential Questions and Thematic Unity

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.

Writing

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.

Genres

Rather than dedicate one unit to poetry, I'd like to weave poetry into all the units.

Communication

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.