Time flies when you're having fun

It is hard to believe the semester is coming to a close. I very much enjoyed all of the learning experiences that I had with all of you. To those of you preparing to teach the future of America, good luck. I cannot imagine what that would be like to go and do. If I do ever get into teaching at the collegiate level, I know that what I have learned will help me greatly in being a better teacher. I hope that I can stay in touch with many of you to get some pointers about this whole teaching thing and if you guys need anything from me, I'd be happy to help you out. Good luck out there teachers!

The Classics

I really am a stickler for the classics. I love learning about and finding new understandings of the Canon. Now, there are two issues with the canon, namely, diversity and relevance. Kids may have trouble relating to the texts and most of the texts were written by heterosexual white men. I feel like a lot of the argument about young adult lit revolves around YAL or the classics. I like the idea that we explored with graphic novels, why not both?

There are many young adult literature books that you could read in tandem with a classic text so that the students can better understand and more deeply take in the story. There are many modern adaptions of canonical works, as well as books that tackle the same themes. For example, Chuck Palahniuk based his main three character's in Fight Club off the love triangle from The Great Gatsby. Coraline by Neil Gaiman tackles a girl trying desprately to fit in and discover herself, but in the way The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger is about a boy's look inward to see who he is.

Now, combining relevant stories with non-print activities such as drama and video assignments, I think that students can gain a much deeper and better understanding of the classic texts.

Drama and understanding

I have always stuck my nose up to acting out scenes from a play or book. I always felt like I didn't know enough to really portray the character well. And then we participated in the drama for class last Monday. I must say, it did help me get into the mindset of the character a lot. I began to really feel for the character that I was embodying. I was able to relate to the character's struggle. I definitely think that this takes a higher level of comprehension than most middle school or early high schoolers are capable of, but I think it could be very effective none the less.

I really enjoyed the activities outside of just acting out some scenes. It moves away from the two dimensional view of characters that is common in short stories. Students can find a deeper understanding of character's motivations. So the grocery store owner in the poem we read. A quick shallow analyses of him shows a mean father who doesn't really care about his family, he just wants to make money at his store. But, through process drama, you may discover a loving and devoted husband and father who is just trying to provide for his family and keep their main source of income.

Supplement or Replacement?

Graphic novels... should they be used to supplement or to replace canonical literature. From my experience, they can greatly help at risk students understand the classic texts. Students may have trouble picturing how a scene would look or may need a visual cue to help them understand little parts of the plot that may not be as obvious in pure text form. As a general rule though, adaptations of classic texts have a tendency to leave out parts of a story. The graphic novel adaption of Portrait of Dorian Grey leaped from Dorian as an innocent youth to his corrupt adult life, skipping over his development and loss of innocents. This gives less of a portrait of Dorian Grey and more of an overview. (bad pun, I know)

Also, other novels like A Wrinkle In Time are challenging to change into a visual format. The story has a scene that takes place in a two dimensional universe and another universe that the characters cannot seem to describe in human speech. This means that both of these universes would be very challenging to draw.

Last Week's Project

After talking with Sammi and Emily, we decided that going into class on Monday, we did not have much hope for our video. All of us had trouble story boarding our ideas and utilizing the camera shots to maximize the message we were trying to send. It wasn't until we actually worked together that things began to come together. I realized that we were doing a really good job of working together. One person would offer an idea, the other two would listen, comprehend, and then offer an advancement of the idea.

At the beginning of the project, I really didn't think it was going to go so well, but I really think that our video is pretty good. Little recommendation, read Alexie Sherman's short story on D2L. It is a quick read and will make the video a lot less confusing. My girlfriend watched the movie before she read the story and had no clue what was going on. After she read the story though, she thought it was really good.

My Podcast

The podcast was another assignment that I found out took more work than I was expecting. Going into it, I was expecting to just hit record and talk about the book. I tried that and then made a check list using the rubric. I realized I missed a whole lot of stuff. So I thought I would have the rubric out while I recorded. The recording ended up sounding fake and just not very fluid. So I wrote a list of things to talk about and went off of that. That is what ended up working the best.

Also, writing the podcast forced me to do more research than I expected. But because I love the book, doing research was not a hard for me to do. Over all, good assignment. I definitely think I could work stuff like this into projects I do on the side.

A Video Project

I always have a similar hesitations when I hear about assignments with videos. First off, when I had to do a video assignment in middle school, we didn't have digital recording (or at least I didn't have access to it). So for a video project, we did each scene in one take, in order, and had no way of editing or refining the project. So when I got the assignment I thought of all of the cool things that I could do with it and how it awesome mine was going to be. Then, when we watched through it, I discovered the sound was really different for different scenes, and the quality was NOTHING like the movies (which I kinda expected, not knowing better). Now I know technology has come a long way, but that might heighten the expectations of students.

Next, there is the issue of participation. In large projects, its easy for students to assume a more minor role and still receive credit for an assignment. A solution to this is to make a set of jobs for the movie and divide the work load. So the writer writes the script, the director makes artistic decisions on how the scenes should be shot, and the actor investigates the motivations of why the character they are portraying acts the way he/she does. All members of the group would be required to do research on the subject of their video. So, after the project is complete, each student would write a paper presenting what they discovered in their research and how that effected decisions. Along the lines of participation, what if the writer doesn't do his job? Do you penalize the other members of the group? How can you grade the other members of the group?

My final hesitation is the time factor. Students finding time just to get together for filming can be a huge challenge. On top of that, they have to wait on the writer to write the script, find extras, and edit the video. Your students will have other assignments going on and it is hard to imagine devoting that much time to just your project.