Thanks, Jade

I was reading my freshmen’s last papers of the course yesterday with some mixed feelings—mixed because it was a gorgeous day outside, my tomatoes are still in pots, and I was grumpy about having to spend so many hours reading about Odysseus, much as I love the man; and also, fleetingly, excited as I thought about next September.  I hope to have many of these same kids in Accelerated II, and it struck me as I was grading that I should do a project which centers on journeys.  Because of my peculiar passion for the work, my students can tell you about Odysseus’ odyssey in nauseating  detail, from each of his dalliances with nymphs to his dissembling in various locales.  The Odyssey is possibly the richest work I know.  I have read it in a tent during a weeklong downpour on the Gaspe Peninsula, while waiting in traffic on the way to the city, on the plane to MT.  I reread it each summer, whether or not I have just taught it.

I have never really thought about the curriculum of English II as being “about” journeys except, naturally, Huck Finn.  But there’s also Catcher in the Rye (while largely in NYC, it’s an odyssey of the mind and soul), The Great Gatsby (Gatsby’s odyssey into the upper class), Of Mice and Men (a failed odyssey), The Crucible (yikes)…and then Macbeth…Hmmm…scotched again, but I can figure that out.  And I am not familiar enough with The House on Mango Street yet to say how/if that could fit.

How cool would it be to create a webquest that somehow linked all these works as journeys?  This occurred to me as I was reading Jade’s paper about how other literature has borrowed, consciously or not, from Homer’s work.  A million things have happened between Jade’s paper and now, but once school is out –Friday is graduation!—I will be able to think more about it.  Should it be summative or should each work be covered as we finish it?  Can I base it on The Odyssey?  (Not all classes read all 462 pages.)  If the latter, I think it would be cool to find parallels to the encounter with the Underworld, e.g., and Odysseus’ meeting with the blind prophet Tereisias. (Mr. Antolini, in Catcher, comes immediately to mind.)  Finding links to contextual/cultural information would also be so cool—the South during slavery, of course, but also the “roaring” ‘20s (Gatsby), NYC in the 40s/50s (Catcher), etc.  

(I note as I type that if this were a student’s paper I would circle the numerous uses of “cool” and write “rep.” in the margin in purple pen.  Oh well.)

Other things I’d like to do?  I feel like I’d like to create a playlist for myself of all of the great tools I’ve been hearing about in class and elsewhere.  (Last week, I heard about thinglink.com, a site which apparently allows you to create narrative time-lines with graphics.)  How many bazillion things do I not yet know about and don’t currently have time to experiment with?  Maybe the summer session can provide some playtime, Lisa?  

And yes, I’d like to have a website for my class…Hard to think about when I have my advanced writing seminar students’ portfolios still to grade, senior grades due Wednesday, and two sets of exams to amend, collate and then grade in the next few days.  I really look forward to thinking about how to do my job better, which isn’t always easy or practical when in the throes, paradoxical as that may sound.   

Arresting Pavlov

I am writing this at the Montshire Children’s Museum, a great spot for thinking about how —as the article said—to “spark our curiosity and sense of wonder.”  (Partner and toddler explore while I write.)

As I was reading through step IV of the “Research Cycle,”  I thought back to a professor I had in grad. school, Eleanor Duckworth, the author of The Having of Wonderful  Ideas:  And Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Teachers College Press, 1996).  Her whole “take” was experientially-based:  She had her students think about physical phenomena like planetary orbits/rotation, e.g., by watching and charting the phases of the moon.   I was 30 and had never really thought about it, believe it or not—so the a-ha! moment was perhaps all the more momentous.  I remember her introducing a Frost poem (“Design”) by asking us what we “noticed about the poem.”  Naturally I launched into a literary analysis—years of training had made it a totally Pavlovian response:  see poem; drool; analyze—but she stopped me cold.  That wasn’t what she wanted.  She wanted me to experience the poem in an immediate way, not to detach myself from it by using lingo and yammering on about its structure.

A-ha!

I still use this technique with my students, and find that it exacts an equally refreshing shift from them.  Just the other day in Mythology, we were talking about a poem by Emily Dickinson about Abraham and Isaac.  Dickinson’s work is a perfect vehicle for using this method because the idiosyncratic structure and punctuation can be alienating to kids, but if you start with “what they notice,” it allows them to see the discrete elements and then work their way toward the whole.

Now how to translate this thinking into research projects, using the “Research Cycle.”  I am thinking about the types of online, and other, research I have kids do, from looking into the spread of hate groups to Tolkien’s sources in Norse mythology in The Hobbit.  I can see how the steps advocated in the Cycle would work for many of the projects I assign, but can also see, having read (part of) the article, that I will have to re-frame my own thinking about these assignments:  I have approached my teaching, in this sense, in the same way I first approached the Frost poem, before Eleanor brought me up short.  Too often, I have a pre-determined set of things I want them to get to, which I then relentlessly guide them toward—without letting them frame their own “essential questions” and think about how to get to an end result that is meaningful to them.

As an example of a time when something totally unexpected and stunning happened during a research-assignment, I was having my students look at hate-group activity in general (numbers of groups, their locations, etc.) the morning after Obama won the election several years ago now…When all at once, all the white-supremacist sites they were on crashed.  We figured out that Obama’s victory had caused such a surge of fear among people who frequent those sites (or who might not have ever logged on previously, but harbored those beliefs) that the volume of their posts and activity downed the sites.  Talk about a real-life experience with what I was trying to teach!  I have to believe that those serendipitous occasions, the intersections of teaching and reality, could occur more often were I to let the students themselves be more generative—though perhaps not in the totally chilling way it happened that morning.

How about using hate-groups as a topic with my soon-to-be “unleveled” sophomores?  I often assign The Laramie Project in 10^th grade; though I have never taught it to levels other than Accelerated (Honors), I don’t see why the play couldn’t work even for kids who don’t think of themselves as readers—it is made up of snippets of speech and dialogue taken from real-life interviews and dialogue among people in Laramie after Matt Shephard was murdered.  The language is as stark as the topic, and I think most students will be able to handle the content.

A hate-group research project after reading the play raises certain other dilemmas, so how I frame it is of paramount importance:  It’s a look at the organized face of what happened more precipitously (and possibly less calculatedly, depending on whose version you believe)  in Laramie.  

When I think of central questions I myself would like them to get at, they include why hate groups exist, and what external events spark a surge in their membership; what the range of hate-groups is—who’s being targeted, and why;  where they are primarily located, etc. (The SPLC, if I remember correctly, had logged an entry on their watch-list about a group which existed fleetingly at our own high school, the NHRS—“N—ger-Hanging Redneck Society—their vigilance is pretty remarkable.  It was an eye-opener for the kids to see their own community listed on the site.) 

I am going to have to think a  lot more about how to make this work, but our sojourn at the Montshire is over now with an unanticipated toddler- temp. of 101.  So it goes.  As the authors say in Stage IV (“Stating Suppositions—Hypothesizing and Predicting”), “Why do you suppose that happened?  How will the evening go?  What, if any, sleep will you get?”