Summer is here, so now that I have some time again, I can pick up on this old project of keeping a blog. Before I dive into my long list of summer plans, projects, and books I'd like to read, I think it will set a nice foundation for future entries if I review the school year that just ended. After all, it has been a year (almost) since I wrote anything:
This year, I was eager to apply the lessons I learned last summer at the Southern California Writing Project (SCWriP) at UCSB. I had my juniors and seniors write about their hopes, fears, and dreams, draw neighborhood maps, and create literacy timelines. These are all projects I learned about at SCWriP. Now that the year has ended, I realize we never returned to our hopes, fears, and dreams to see if any of them actually came true! But I can do this with my former juniors, who will return as seniors. I also don't think my former juniors ever wrote a "neighborhood story" based on their neighborhood maps. Well, next year they can do that too. Maybe it will be material for a future college essay?
In September, juniors read a smattering of poems, articles, amd stories designed to lay the groundwork for American Literature. Much as I would have liked to, we never really returned to these themes. I even wrote assignments that I never used around them. The first poem was, "Where Is My County?" from the poetry anthology Unsettling America. This poem is about the speaker having her ethnicity mistaken by many different people and I thought it would establish a pluralist frame to the idea of "American Literature" by showing that being American means being many things to many people. There is no single definition or single canon of American literature. After that we read an early chapter from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I love this book. This chapter is a mentor text showcasing Cisneros's masterful use of rich sensory imagery and a literary devices. It also describes a house right after the juniors finished drawing their neighborhood maps. Their homework after reading this was to write about a house. So we did do some writing based on neighborhood maps. Next we read the short story by Salman Rushdie "At The Auction of the Ruby Slippers" which discusses the value of home, not just as a place, but as an idea, a destination where one is perpetually arriving. This idea takes me back to my days as an undergrad at UCSB in a Chicano Studies class on Postcolonialism when we read Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra (And The Earth Did Not Swallow Me) by Tomas Rivera. In this book, the author realizes finding home is a perpetual struggle. I believe that is what the experience is for many Americans. I would like to lead my students to that idea or have them get there on their own.
After reading these pieces, as well as a chapter from Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde and a few Native American legends (which we acted out) about Coyote, we dove into The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now one thing about The Scarlet Letter that I feel I have never properly set up as a teacher is the influence of Transcendentalism. The Scarlet Letter takes place in a Puritan colony hundreds of years before Transcendentalism. We read it first for this chronological reason. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived among many Transcendentalists and their ideas play out in multiple ways in The Scarlet Letter. In the future, I would like to go out of chronological order, by introducing students to Transcendentalism before reading The Scarlet Letter, in order to better set the stage.
In any case, Hawthorne's masterpiece provides many opportunities to teach various literary devices and I still feel it supports multiple readings and interpretations, making it a book worth keeping in my curriculum.
I know I should not be teaching the curriculum around books, but rather around "big ideas" such as American Exceptionalism, American Optimism, or Racism, Classism, Sexism, and more abstract concepts or essential questions. But I am still stuck in this mindset of "which book to read" which can limit the curriculum to literary analysis -- a mode I need to step out of as a teacher. But before I get too far afield, I want to refocus on reviewing the year:
The next book we read was The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Now, this involved leaping ahead 250 years from the Puritans. Why such a dramatic leap? Well, we were trying to get to Steinbeck because the junior teachers were planning an interdisciplinary field trip to Monterey which would include The Steinbeck Center in Salinas. This field trip was scheduled for January or February, so I had to have students reading The Grapes of Wrath by then.
I have not read everything by Steinbeck, but I have read East of Eden, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Wayward Bus, and Of Mice and Men, so I have read a few of his works, and I can say this: The Grapes of Wrath is by far his best book out of those choices. When am I going to assign a book for all my students to read, I want to pick a text with multiple levels. Students must be able to interpret the text in a nearly infinite number of ways, or else why read it? I want to teach active reading so students can support their particular interpretation of a text with evidence. Why read a text that only supports one meaning? The Grapes of Wrath has so meny elements to it (class, gender, nature, violence...) that students can take it in any direction they please.
The problem at this point is that we are only reading books by White men. Our school year is divided into five six-week terms. It took me all of last year to learn this, but I can basically teach one whole-class novel per term. The Scarlet Letter was term one. The Great Gatsby was term two. The Grapes of Wrath started in term three, but, due to the length of the novel and given a few interruptions (including the field trip itself), ended in term four. After this, we only had one term to read a text by someone who was not a White male.
Students were looking forward to reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut but I just could not go through a year exclusively reading books by White men when the course is titled "American Literature" and obviously should include so much more than one perspective. So I split the class up into reading groups, which was a first for me, but I think many students enjoyed the change in format to the course, and I think some also appreciated the change in the author's perspective. Students read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (or some of it), Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and some still read Slaughterhouse Five. It wasn't exactly "choice reading" because students were assigned to groups based on their top three choices.
Generally, students wrote an essay about each book they read. They also wrote a few creative pieces: One about a walk, based on Thoreau's essay "Walking" and a travelogue about their trip to Monterey. They researched an American poet who they then wrote a paper about, but I did not give them a proper introduction to analyzing poetry, which is a difficult skill, and one that will be worth further developing next year. The assignment was meant to assess and develop their research skills. I did see where they needed help in creating a Works Cited that corresponded to in-text citations.
So looking back, I would like to have more diversity in the texts we read, as well as a better introduction to Transcendentalism, and more thorough demonstration and practice of analyzing poetry. Lastly, I would also like to help my students develop their listening and speaking skills. Ninth graders and tenth graders give a chapel talk to the rest of their class. The chapel talk is something all seniors do before the entire school. It is a ten-minute speech and the topic is determined by the speaker. It is a wonderful reflection of the trust in our community: students and faculty alike share and speak their truth. The ninth and tenth grade English teacher has siezed a brilliant opportunity in bringing this to her students, and I need to bring it to the eleventh-graders as well. Furthermore, seniors make announcements, lead job crews, and are prefects, so they need to practice those public-speaking skills.
That is a lot to focus on for next year! But there's more: Seniors will need help with college essays. Juniors and seniors will need more opportunities to practice research skills, citing sources, and creating a Works Cited. They need to evaluate their sources and revise their theses.
On top of this, I have student evaluations to respond to. My number one priority is to establish a coherent grading system, and discuss it with my students. I think I will give separate rubrics for expository, narrative, and argumentative writing. My second goal is to increase the depth of analysis we go into in class. Students feel that we just barely scratch the surface of each text. Does this mean leaving more time for discussion and processing a text in class? I think it means being more intentional and focused in those discussions. After attending a training on Socratic Seminars, I came away with some new ideas and applied them in class to get a deeper discussion, but I did not do this consistently throughout the year. So next year, I will do at least one Socratic Seminar with each class per term. Part of this desire for a greater depth of analysis, is the fact that my students want to feel more challenged in my classes. When thinking of ways to do this, I remembered overhearing students discuss terms like "intersectionality" which are pretty advanced but are not taught in my class. I think my students are ready for more than what I have offered them. To push them further, I could bring in some literary theory, which is really just a higher level of rigor in reading. So that is a summer investigation topic as well. My third and last goal, is tied into the second one: to develop better classroom management. I have classroom management systems in place. But how consistently do I enforce them and how often do I offer consequences when students don't follow through? Not often enough. This means next year, I will try to be consistent and firm in my expectations and in the consequences I give students. But I will also be calm and compassionate: I will be myself.
I don't really know if I am writing this for anyone other than myself, but if anyone has constructive feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear it!
Writing this reflection and these goals for next year, will hopefully help me realize these goals. Putting dreams and desires into words may help them come true. At SCWriP, we were reminded that as teachers, we are also writers and researchers: we are creating new knowledge out of our personal experiences, and by sharing that knowledge, we may be able to generalize certain truths that have escaped us.
Future topics I will try to write about include my summer reading list, summer reading progress, summer projects, and reflections on reading. I assigned my students a weekly reading log over the summer, so I am going to try to keep one myself. I am already behind!
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