Prometheus...Teaching

The best assignments are those that move students from where they are to where they could or should be, but how does the movement work? Is it akin to traveling on a road, making a series of stops, or is it more a snowball effect, creating mass? Most teachers “get” that a high-quality assignment incorporates critical thinking and standards, and that rigor equates to challenge.  However, we sometimes get caught up in creating individual challenging, rigorous lessons without determining how and where they impact the whole.  

 

If we consider every assignment as a singular event, we create a linear experience. The assignment may be high-quality and may even be rigorous, but if it’s developed with point A to point B thinking, we are buying into the mile-long, inch-deep approach.

However, if we consider each assignment as a connective transition, we don’t move linearly; we create an expanding sphere of knowledge and practice—a fusion of ideas that creates meaning for and from a larger whole. 

Consider the following assignment, which was part of a unit on Evil, which was part of a year-long English curriculum designed to help students contemplate the question “What makes us human?” 

They read Shelley’s Frankenstein and created collages representing their analyses of the symbolism in the novel. Use of a non-text response to a print medium is challenging on many levels, and I could have had them simply present their work and stopped there, assigning them a grade, which would’ve been an “okay” assignment. 

High quality? Sure, if you consider the multitude of standards embraced by it. Rigorous? Yes, at least according to what research has to say on this sort of thing.  

 

However, by understanding the idea that an assignment is a transition of thought, designed to expand thinking in connection to the next assignment (or unit), we can craft more in-depth, challenging coursework.

We created an art gallery and moved from picture to picture, discussing the works, but the artists were not permitted to speak about their own designs. They had to listen to how viewers interpreted their non-print symbolism analyses; thus, the assignment garnered analysis on two levels: from the spectator p.o.v. as well as self-reflective and evaluative levels (How well did I succeed in conveying the meaning?).

Then the students presented their intended meanings. The class took notes on the intentions, and wrote a rhetorical analysis. How and how well did the artist convey his/her argument for the symbolism in Frankenstein? 

So, for those keeping track: the students have analyzed for their own purposes (creating the collage), analyzed another’s purpose, evaluated, and self-evaluated. Here’s where we really make the biggest impact, though.

While we’d been working on these collages in-class, the students had read their next text: Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’.  We had our standard discussion, ensuring comprehension and garnering reactions.

However, the students then had to select a poster (not their own), originally designed for Frankenstein, that they felt best represented an argument in It.  They made extremely powerful, emotional connections between Shelley and Pelzer, the Creature and David as well as Victor and Catherine, which further deepened their understanding of humanity. 

To arrive at the sort of assignment that quickens the intellect, teachers need to have the end in mind, but we also need to understand that the end isn’t a destination. It is a state of understanding that has been reached through a series of expanding, spherical layers. The destination is already inside the student, and purposefully layering assignments to help him/her attain  a personal depth of understanding is what a truly rigorous curriculum does.  
  

 Mindy Keller-Kyriakides is the author of Transparent Teaching of Adolescents: Defining the Ideal Class for Students and Teachers.  Become part of the conversation!

Cynical Teens and the Literature We Feed Them

I suppose I have to preface this whole thing by saying I don't want to eliminate the use of powerful literature. I do support the teaching of works from Faulkner, Cisneros, Orwell, Walker,and many others. I'm not talking about historical selections either, by the way. We have to teach history and all the ickiness that comes with it.

However, I'm sure you'll agree that most literature selections for high-schoolers (9-12th grade) are profoundly negative. They deal with negative themes, such as revenge, racism, anger, war, genocide, injustice, abandonment. Most include murders, suicides, abuse of authority/power. 

Our non-fiction selections center around individuals usually in dire circumstances, who overcome those circumstances (maybe). Those circumstances generally being war, poverty, abuse, illness, and more. Even poetry selections tend to be negative. Consider these lines from Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner":

               When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Our lesson for the day? Imagery. Apparently, as our teacher said, we were not "getting it". So, she assigned this one from our textbook. For the student to get the imagery, here, he/she has to visualize someone shot to death in WWII ball turret to the extent that the body is a mash of bloody pulp. (I mention this particular poem because it traumatized me for months after reading it.)

I have to think that today's battle-weary gamer would shrug this off with ease.   Callousness is another potential issue with the negative themes and story-lines. The impact is minimal.  Murder? Pshaw, just another news story, game, movie.

Somewhere after middle school, the literary tide turns to the darker side human life. One of the arguments for the selections promoted in a recent discussion I encountered was that students need to see the non-examples in an effort to get them to understand negative consequences or to create "What if" scenarios.  For example, what if so and so character had chosen to do something else (as opposed to murdering, bullying, abusing, etc.). What might be a better way to handle this situation?

Of course, literature can be used this way, but I have to wonder why we can't provide them with an example of someone doing the right thing or a positive example. I have to presume this has to do with the cynicism of teens. They simply don't see people doing the right thing very often, do they?  They see adults in their lives self-medicating with alcohol, drugs. They see abuse, whether physical or verbal. They see authority figures doing the wrong thing. 

They see the core of the darkness all the time. They live it.
 
Is the emphasis on negative themes truly helping them consider potentially negative outcomes? Or would they be better served by our providing them (at least once in a unit) with a positive text? Granted, we can only teach To Kill a Mockingbird (effectively) one time, and it is a middle-school selection. But surely, there is another Atticus Finch for high schoolers? Would they accept him/her, though, or would they sneer with derisive cynicism because nobody "really" acts this way?

Does the positive message of a text get lost when a good person makes the right choices, but the problem--racism or corruption, for example--remains? What does that say about our ability to tackle the social ills that plague our cultures? If our students feel that the problems are insurmountable, and don't see the impact of small changes or ideas, then they may be less apt to even consider the "What if" scenarios.

Because they might feel that doing the right thing doesn't matter anyway.  If we can, we need to help them see a much larger picture. And we're going to have to have some evidence for it. Literature may be one way to do that.


I'd love for you all to share some of your literary selections that emphasize a positive example or a character making positive choices! Maybe we just need to have a few to consider, specifically for high school.  




Mindy and some of her former students recently published Transparent Teaching of Adolescents, a discussion of effective teaching strategies for high school. Join the conversation!

Get Rid of Romeo and Whatsinhername

By the time students graduate from high school all they can tell you about Shakespeare is that they had to read Romeo and Juliet and either the "Scottish Tragedy" or Othello, generally accompanied with a rolling of eyes. Why are we so quick to load already arguably-depressed teens down with tragic Shakespeare? The recommended texts per CCSS are Macbeth and Hamlet, if you’re wondering.
 
If we are truly concerned with suicide ideation, bullying, and domestic abuse, then shouldn’t we move away from these darker sides of humanity in our literature choices?

The beauty of Shakespeare, we English-teacher types argue, lies in his understanding of human nature and motivation, use of poetry and dramatic structure. mmkay. Then, I humbly suggest that we use some of his comedies to share these same elements with students.

Joe Dixon (Bottom) and Andrea Harris (Titania) in A Midsummer Night's Dream by the RSC. 

Photograph: Tristram Kenton. January 16, 2009

Consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which pulls on teen heartstrings just as much, if not more, than R and J. Imagine their reactions to Helena and her machinations, Hermia’s rebellion against an arranged marriage, the outrageously funny Pyramus and Thisby, and the perfect tying up of every plot point—all worlds, the natural, the supernatural, and the created are one.

It’s beautiful, fun, and provides students with an answer to why Shakespeare is timeless.  It answers, “Why do we have to read this?” with a chuckle and perhaps a stronger lean towards understanding his creative choices as a playwright. 

That’s what we want them to understand about him… isn’t it?

Further, what does our audience of students need to read, today? What might effectively transport them to another time, place, and situation, where they might just want to stay for a while?

Some years ago, when Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne plowed through Florida, we decided to cancel our theatre department’s production of Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. After six weeks of no school, we could have pulled it together with a bit less flair, but we took a moment to think about our audience.

Our intended audience was trying to get back on its feet after losing homes, loved ones, and jobs. We all had firsthand knowledge of MREs and generators, and what it was like to go without water and electricity for weeks. People fought each other over bags of ice. Bare signposts and fallen trees, blue FEMA tarps on roofs, and devastated businesses—these were the sights that greeted us on the way into school in the aftermath. That and our gym roof that had been peeled away from the building like a sheet of aluminum foil.

While Miracle Worker is a profound and wonderful play, it just wasn’t what our audience needed.  So, instead, we wrote a play: a comedy that pulled in laughter to help overcome the dark moments. A comedy that spoke to their spirits at that moment.

Comedy, and an analysis of this art form, may be what our audience of students needs. Enough what with the death and the dying and the killing and the feuding families. They’ve got that covered, I think.

Do we dare go against the tide and take a creative risk with students, or do we rest on our tried-and-true already-printed out lesson plans, literary guides, and tests for Romeo and Juliet?