Home » Curriculum » English II Pre-AP 2009-2010

4. What goes on in our inner worlds?

Essential Question

What goes on in our inner worlds?

Learning Targets

  • Students can analyze the use of voice in an essay, reading closely for tropes, diction, imagery, and allusions. Students can evoke voice and an inner world in personal essays.
  • Students can define, identify, and explain allegory, epic simile, poetic justice
  • Students can explain humanism, objectivity, subjectivity, and the classical, medieval, and early modern (Renaissance) mindsets. Students can use these concepts to contrast texts by Dante and Petrarch.

Core Texts

Assessment

External resources

  • The Princeton Dante Project is a college-level resource, most appropriate for teachers.
  • Douglas Hesse's article, "Imagining a Place for Creative Nonfiction," in English Journal vol. 99, no. 2, offers thoughts on reading and writing creative nonfiction.

Reflections

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.

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