Tag Archives: teaching

Teaching Literature and Music

Posted by Jackie in education, media mentions, personal goals, teaching, writing and tagged with , , , , , ,
mixtape

mixtape (Photo credit: miss_rogue)

The sweet spot between literature and music has always fascinated me, as both are among the primary forces that shape my life and how I see my place in the world. In teaching, I’ve tried to weave them together whenever I can, using music to introduce elements of tone and theme when discussing novels, and sometimes sharing songs with my students that I think connect to our texts. So far, I’ve seen three major ways to connect music and literature, all of which could have great implications in the classroom.

Type One: Literary Mixtapes

The major source for Literary Mixtapes I’ve found is at Flavorwire, a real treasure trove for book and music lovers. They’ve done mixtapes for characters from Holly Golightly to Harriet the Spy and tons in between, and the newer ones connect to Spotify playlists, which is even better for me.

My friend Dana Huff also made mixtapes on Spotify for Holden, Gatsby, Harry Potter, Lady Macbeth. This could be a great assignment for teaching characterization, especially for these kinds of complex characters, really encouraging students to delve deep into that character’s identity and the forces that have shaped it.

Type Two: Music Mentioned Explicitly in Book

This is a fun project for books that are built around certain musical forms or that mention music explicitly in the book. I’ve subscribed to a playlist on Spotify that compiles all the opera mentioned in Bel Canto , for example. This is great especially if you are unfamiliar with the style of music or with certain songs, and can really enrich your reading experience. As far as the classroom goes, I would see this more as an extra credit project, as it doesn’t really address literary elements, but it could prove that a student did a close enough reading of the book to catch every song reference. One recent popular YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, would lend itself really well to an assignment like this.

As a book-and-music nerd, there are a few playlists I’d like to tackle myself. The first would be a pair inspired by a great book I read recently, This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl (review coming soon). One playlist would be of the songs that are mentioned as inspiring Dave Grohl as a musician, which run the gamut from the Beatles to Metallica to Fugazi, and others might be songs by Dave himself in his assorted bands: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures, Queens of the Stone Age, etc. The other would be a playlist of all the songs mentioned in High Fidelity, which would be a massive undertaking, but such fun!

Type Three: Music That Accompanies the Book

This is the category I’ve had the most luck with as far as classroom assignments. In a senior elective I taught last year, I gave them the option of making a soundtrack for King Lear and got a few really outstanding examples, where the students clearly put a lot of thought and care into matching up the songs with different characters, tones, themes and plot points. Inspired by that success, this year I gave my freshmen the option of making a soundtrack for The Catcher in the Rye, and the examples I’ve gotten so far show a real understanding of the novel. Coincidentally, as I was working on this post, Dana did a blog post about theme songs for books, which would be a great shorter assignment as well.

I find this to be a wonderful assignment because while it usually produces high levels of student engagement, it also encourages them to make connections between the novel and their own lives, which is one of the key reasons I think it’s important to teach literature at all. Music is a big deal for many teenagers, and so this meets them on their own turf, but as a music fan myself, it gives me a chance to connect with them and the choices they make.

 

 

In the future, I’d like to try some lessons built around music and song analysis, connected to literature. The Experience Music Project in Seattle has some great resources on its website for lesson plans, oral histories, and multimedia timelines, and I’ve thought a lot about their free distance learning courses for teachers. Also, it’s just an amazing place to visit, if you’ve never been. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland also has some great resources on its website, including lessons and units and information about a summer teacher institute, which has just earned a spot on my professional development dream list!

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May The Best Poem Win!

Posted by Jackie in poetry, teaching and tagged with , ,
Pablo Neruda

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The trial run of my long-awaited March Madness Poetry Tournament is finally here!

I spent a good portion of this weekend, with the help of my Facebook friends, assembling a list of 32 outstanding poems that will compete against each other in head-to-head battles during each of my three freshmen English classes, beginning Tuesday and continuing as long as it takes to reach a final winner. These three final winners will battle it out in front of our entire upper school sometimes in April at one of our morning meetings.

Want to see the competitors? I’ve uploaded the booklet here, though some of the formatting seems a bit wonky. I managed to squeeze in some of my favorites (Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman) and also some poems that are new to me. This project has been gestating for over a year, so I’m also just feeling very satisfied that I finally am getting to see it in action.

I’m so excited to see how my students respond, and to see which classes vote for which, and most of all, what poems will rise to the top. I’m hoping my students enter into the spirit of the tournament, casting aside any notions that poetry is only about the classroom exercise, the fumbling dissection that leaves most of them feeling uncomfortable and awkward in the presence of a poem. Reading poetry should sometimes just be about that gut reaction, that moment when a line or two resonates with you deep down where only the right word can reach.

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New Leaf, New Page: New Semester

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching and tagged with , ,
Cover of The Catcher in the Rye 1985 edition

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This week is midterms at my school, which for the students means hours of cramming and worrying and (hopefully) synthesizing. They are scribbling in blue books and hoping against hope, some of them, that this exam will not swamp the average they’ve worked hard to maintain. Others are hoping for an exam miracle, while others expect, often rightfully so, that this will only be a minor blip in their academic year.

For me, it means looking ahead to the new semester, making reading schedules, deciding whether to keep/pitch/modify old assignments, and planning/revising old units. Should I keep the censorship debate I do with Catcher in the Rye? What activities will I do in my poetry unit? One of my sections will end up with an extra class–how should I fill it? This spring, I’ll finally be implementing the poetry March Madness idea I’ve been dreaming about for at least a year, which is very exciting, but brings its own challenges because our spring break takes place smack in the middle of March.

Looking back almost exactly a year, I’m thrilled to say that I am feeling more balanced, healthy and energetic than I was at this time last year. Instead of spending a major part of my holiday weekend planning for the spring, I saw The King’s Speech with a dear friend (absolutely amazing and wonderful film) and Tangled with my own dear girls. I made brownies and popcorn for a sleepover guest, saw good friends and managed to squeeze in a birthday visit with my mother. It was just exactly what I should have done this weekend, and I’m feeling optimistic about my productivity this week as a result.

The new semester always brings its own thrills, chances to start fresh and correct old mistakes, opportunities for new excitement, and in the spring, the promise of summer beckoning on the horizon. This school year, thankfully, I’m also feeling up to the challenge.

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Final Project: Windows and Mirrors

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching and tagged with ,

Recently Mrs. Chili posted in full the final project assignment for her freshmen after reading Something Wicked This Way Comes. I am wrapping up my senior elective this week, and so I thought I would post the final assignment I gave them (feel free to use or adapt if you like):

In your assignment for our last novel, I wrote that “great literature can serve both as windows and mirrors: providing us ways to see into our greater world, different cultures, times or personalities, while also giving us a new way to see and understand ourselves.” The common thread that united our experience this semester is, of course, generations: within countries, within societies, and within families, and considering always the impact of each on the individual. How did these works allow you to see our country or society more clearly, or perhaps, look more deeply and clearly at the struggles facing your own generation? What effect did they have on your own sense of identity, or place in your own family’s traditions and hierarchies?

In your final assignment for this semester, you will be producing a piece of work, either artistic or literary, that shows how one or more of the works we read together served either as a window or mirror for you as we thought, talked and wrote about generations. This might be a personal essay, a single long-form or series of poems, a literary work stemming from one of your response entries, or a piece of visual or performing art inspired by the novel. Literary responses must be at least 4-5 pages, and you must be prepared to share part of your work with your classmates, whether artistic or literary. Artistic pieces must be accompanied by a 1-2 page artists’ statement.

So far, I’ve gotten some really beautiful pieces as well as some really thoughtful essays, including a collage of family photographs mounted on a canvas, interspersed with shards of broken mirror. “When I look into the mirrors,” the student said, “I see pieces of myself, but I also see my family, and that’s how it should be.”

I was really nervous about teaching this class when it was first assigned to me, but I have truly and deeply enjoyed it, both because I got to teach some beautiful literature, and also because I’ve been lucky enough to teach some amazing students.

Moment

Posted by Jackie in blogging, teaching, writing and tagged with , , ,
A black and white icon of a teacher in front o...

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Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

They are boisterous, they are rowdy, they can be unruly, and I love them so. They are a group of students who clamor for understanding, who fumble wholeheartedly with what they do not comprehend yet, whose hands shoot up and wave frantically to offer the wrong answer, yet they are not deterred. This girl saw a Lifetime movie recently that reminded her of this passage, this girl can’t understand why Janie stays with Joe while the other nods her head knowingly at the antics of love. They wear white polos and red fleeces and short blue skirts; they wear ponytails and headbands and bright smiles and sheer youth and exuberance. I walk among them, letting my laughter join their chorus, nodding my head to encourage more, more, more. I am wearing my school teacher clothes, sensible heels, machine-washable pants, cozy cardigan; I wear my hope and delight on my face, though maybe I shouldn’t display it so nakedly, but still, I cannot resist. They munch on bags of candy and dip their fingers into containers of Lucky Charms and knock back another few swallows of Gatorade; they are always hungry, they are always thirsty, they always need to go to the restroom. When class time is over, they hustle, they rustle, they shove everything into backpacks and stampede out the door, calling and responding and laughing. They leave behind a notebook, sweatpants, empty water bottles, and the rush of energy they have provoked in me.

Teaching makes me feel alive, despite the accompanying paperwork and meetings and politics and other annoyances. This is what I am meant to do, this is why I love my work, and these girls make it worth it, every single day.

This is my Reverb 10 entry for today.

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Thwarted and Questions

Posted by Jackie in blogging, teaching and tagged with ,
Woman teaching geometry. Illustration at the b...

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I spent some time today playing around with Slideshare, which seems like it has a lot of potential for sharing resources, especially for educators or anyone looking for inspiration or intellectual community.

But then one presentation never uploaded, and when I tried to use the embedding function to post another one here, it failed. Bah, humbug. I’m sure I’ll try again another day, but it didn’t serve my needs today. Then I realized I had submitted an essay to a magazine three days after the end of their fall reading period.  I sent an apologetic/pleading email to see if I could resubmit for the winter reading period, but the frustration lingered.  I spent the rest of the day trying to deal with the tidal wave of grading that has been hanging over my head the past few weeks–I graded about forty essays today and did some lesson/assignment planning as well, and now I’m wiped.

All of this meandering whining to say, I wanted to post a thoughtful teaching post to start off the week, but instead of getting thwarted again or boring you with more grading complaints, I thought I would open it to questions or suggestions.

If I were to post about anything teaching-related, what would you like it to be about? Alternately, do you have any questions for me that are at all teaching-related?

Hit me up in the comments!

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Teaching By Calendar

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching, technology and tagged with , ,

Over the past year or so, I’ve become more and more reliant on my website not just as a repository of information for my students, but as integral to our day-to-day operations. I thought I would make a post showing how I use my calendar in our daily lessons–you should be able to click on the images to make them larger.

Every day in my ninth-grade classes, my students begin by visiting my Sharepoint website and going to the calendar for their class. When they click on it, they see this:

This is the monthly view, where there is an event on every day when we have class. This is helpful for us especially as we have a 10-day block schedule, so classes do not meet every day, nor do they meet on the same day of the week every week. Freshmen sometimes have trouble adjusting to the schedule, especially if they come from other schools, and hopefully this is helpful. You can see that due dates have their own events, to set them apart from regular classes, but to aid in long-term planning also. I put up my units as the previous unit finishes, so right now, the calendar has events on it up until mid-January, when we begin midterms.

If they click on a day’s event, they see this:

This has their opening freewrite on it, as well as their homework, and sometimes a brief description of what we’re doing in class this day. They each know to compose a reply to this freewrite and post it in their unit blogs, and we spend the first ten or so minutes of class doing so, every day, and often, we discuss them once they’ve posted. They can also use this time to copy down their homework, but if they choose not to, their homework is always viewable. From time to time, I have them do private freewrites that they keep in their notes, or that they email to me. Any absent student can see the freewrite and homework for the day they missed. Any substitute will at least know the students have this information.

Finally, I also often post documents to the calendar, which looks like this:

I can put up the bulletin in a Word document here, so they can have it in list form as well as mapped out on the calendar. At the beginning of each unit, I put up the documents for the major assignments as well, and I try to put those up again as the assignments come due. I can attach any documents they will need for class that day, and anything I might want them to have if I am absent can be added from home.

Using my calendar this much has really made my teaching more organized and consistent, as well as moving me closer to my teaching paperless goals. Teaching with a website or online calendar is one of the best ways (IMO) to add technology to a classroom without seeming gimmicky or making major pedagogical changes at first, which makes it a nice way to ease into using a teacher website too. I do spend a fair amount of time before each unit getting the calendar updated, but the reduction in paper-shuffling and copying makes it worthwhile, time-wise, and helps cut down on student questioning as well. Any questions regarding classwork or due dates gets a simple, “Check the website, and let me know if you have any questions after that!” The most recent version of Sharepoint is much more user-friendly as far as setting up the calendar events, and I was thrilled to be able to customize the colors much more too.

Questions, thoughts, concerns: as always, welcome in the comments!

180 Days A Year

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, teaching and tagged with , , ,

In a recent online discussion about the teaching profession, a blogger I respect made what I thought to be a snide comment about the easy life of teachers, and how “they only work 180 days a year, after all,” amidst concerns over teacher pay and standards.

Here’s what I spent most of a sunny fall Sunday doing:

  • Created a Powerpoint introducing the idea of the pastoral in literature, to begin my seniors’ unit on Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, which involved fresh research on my part.
  • Created a Powerpoint on the eight techniques of characterization, for use in same unit.
  • Wrote up three documents describing the major assignments of the unit, which have percolated in my mind for a few weeks until I could shape them more carefully on paper, and uploading these documents to my website.
  • Mapped out my senior class until the beginning of December, including uploading information to my course website calendar.
  • Emailed with a colleague about best teaching practices for Beloved, which she is about to teach for the first time. I met this colleague during a workshop I attended last summer.
  • Emailed with ninth-grade students about homework, grades, and organization questions while I checked their online notebooks.
  • Graded fifteen creative pieces for my seniors.
  • Graded forty analytical paragraphs on themes of envy and revenge in the Bible for my ninth-graders.
  • Finished final drafts for three college recommendations, with three left to finish this week.

Do I spend every Sunday this way? No, but I have spent untold weekend days this way since I started this job, and untold evening hours doing similar work. My school days are chock full with parent conferences, teaching classes, faculty meetings, department meetings, student conferences, my club responsibilities, and other school obligations, so I often need to spend a full day or block of evening hours attending to important business I can’t get done during the day.

And I consider myself, in many ways, lucky to have done so. Lucky that I have a smaller teaching load and class sizes with more free periods than many of my peers, lucky that I don’t need to work a second job on the weekends, as many teachers do, lucky to have a supportive spouse who can take my kids to lunch and pick them up from a sleepover while I work. I’m lucky to have found my vocation, and lucky to be in a workplace that values me as a person and professional colleague and gives me safe working conditions, with dedicated students who have access to technology and other resources and privileges. Many of my colleagues in the teaching profession don’t have what I have, and are still doing fantastic jobs against high odds.

If we really wonder why the best and brightest don’t go into teaching, one of my many answers would have to be because most of the country doesn’t seem to understand or value what my colleagues and I do, or just how many hours and days a year we spend trying to do it better.

My First Prezi

Posted by Jackie in personal goals, teaching, technology and tagged with , , , ,
Image representing Prezi as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Remember all those new tricks I’m trying this year? Well, I haven’t made as much progress on that list as I’d like–I’ve implemented the two-blog system, but haven’t been blogging with them myself yet, for example, though I plan to start soon (more tech snafus than I anticipated have slowed me down).

But we began our grammar study this week, and to review parts of speech, I made my first Prezi! This is the first step towards my goal of encouraging my students to make more interesting visual presentations, while also making mine more exciting as well. The immediate visual benefit of Prezi is the way your presentation swoops around the screen, but working on mine this weekend showed me others: the clean design styles, the easy-to-use uploading of images and videos, and the ability to easily and publicly share it. I added the relevant Schoolhouse Rock videos for each term, and it was a snap, seriously. Definitely a fresh take on presenting and a real challenger for Powerpoint, and that’s considering that there are functions I haven’t even used yet, and that Prezi is now allowing real-time collaboration on presentations.

Feel free to click over to my Parts of Speech Review and see what you think, and please use it for your own classes if it would be helpful!

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My School Uniform

Posted by Jackie in teaching and tagged with , ,
Comparison of the "cowboy" heel and ...

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A friend at work sent me a link today on five wardrobe essentials for the female academic in humanities, knowing that #2 (cardigans) are high on my list. I’d been tossing around the idea of a post on my own school uniform for awhile after reading some great advice on work wardrobes, so here instead are my own work wardrobe essentials:

  1. CARDIGANS!  I am the queen of cardigans, and I think you should be too.  I’d recommend them in your neutrals (I own black, brown, grey, navy), but I’d also recommend them in some colors and prints, preferably in the same palette of colors you wear a lot of already (for me: green, blue, purple, pink).  Brown skirt + printed top + brown cardigan= pulled-together look, just as white top + black pants + printed cardigan= pulled-together look.  Plus of course, you get to solve the pesky air-conditioning issue and can stretch out how long you can wear your cute short-sleeved tops.  Cardigans are the quintessential “cozy” in my mind.
  2. DRESSES!  When I was younger, I saw dresses as only for fancy occasions, and I was much more of a t-shirt-and-jeans kind of girl.  Now I see dresses as the perfect wardrobe solution for busy mornings.  Woke up late?  Throw on a dress.  Too tired to match separate pieces?  Throw on a dress.  Feeling shlumpy?  Throw on a dress.  Don’t want something uncomfortable pulling across your waist?  Choose a dress!  Worried about seeming too casual?  Dress!  Done and done.  Put on a cardigan over it in the cooler weather and wear it even more.
  3. TIGHTS!  If you’re going to wear dresses all year, you need tights, but also, tights can add a certain flair and cohesion to your outfit.  I like to match my tights to my cardigans if I’m wearing a solid colored one, but sometimes tights can add an interesting pattern (I like herringbone) or element of color.
  4. NECKLACES!  I don’t wear earrings, other than two silver cartilage piercings in my left ear, and I don’t do bracelets or rings other than my wedding bands.  But I do definitely do necklaces, which can be an easy way to add something sparkly, pick up a color in a print, or be a neutral that ties your outfit together again.  I like to match my necklace to the palette of my tights/cardigans/shoes, and I buy most of mine at Target.
  5. PENCIL SKIRTS!  These are my absolute favorites– fitted, flattering, appropriate, easy to find, easy to wear.  For the curvy and/or pear-shaped among us, a good pencil skirt is your friend.  I have them in cotton and corduroy, prints and solids, and am always delighted to find more.
  6. BOOTS!  If you’ve been with me for awhile, you know about my love affair with boots.  Right now I have two leather pairs (brown and black, both riding-style) and two suede pairs (low heels, gray and wine), as well as my trusty cowboy boots that I wear with jeans on the weekends.  Would I like more?  Of course, though I have not yet been persuaded by the ankle-boot phenomenon.

I don’t consider myself particularly stylish or bold, and there are a lot of trends and pieces that are simply beyond me-I don’t wear belts, or many scarves, or certain colors (yellow), and most of my pieces would safely be called “basic.”  It’s taken me a lot of research and shopping (and money!), but now I can safely say I know what I like, and keeping these colors, pieces and rules in mind makes adding to my work closet much simpler than it was when I first began.

Tell me about your work wardrobe!

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