Absurdity and Satire

            Over the past couple of weeks the class has finished Hamlet and is now moving on to Camus’ The Absurd Man, The Stranger, and Metamorphosis.  The students seem to be excited about reading these works.  They have been asked to acquire their own copies of The Stranger and Metamorphosis for two reasons.  The first reason being that the schools copies are from the 1970’s and are falling apart, and the second that my CT is teaching them how to annotate texts and wants them to annotate these two novels as part of that lesson.  These works will continue and eventually conclude the unit on Existentialism and the Absurd.

           

            I am working on my lessons for the introduction of Satire which I will be teaching in the next three weeks.  I am using an essay by Robert Harris called “The Purpose and Method of Satire” as well as high level questions for the students to answer about the article.  I also wish to include some clips from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report to highlight how Satire is used every day.  I also hope that using these modern media sources will help the students build upon their background knowledge.  After that I will be teaching Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

            I had the opportunity to observe my CT as he conference with the students one-on-one about their essays.  As part of the writing workshop that the class participated in at the beginning of the year he has now graded and returned their essays.  That being said, he returned the graded essays and had the students spend some time going over the comments that he left for them.  The students were then instructed to write a reflection upon the comments and write an informal reflection about what they did well and what they need to improve upon.  Most of the students treated the exercise with importance because my CT stressed to them that this part of the process was not graded but will only serve to make them better writers in the future.  He stressed that they needed to grow in their writing now in order to be successful when they get to college next year.  That being said, one of the students that I observed seemed to understand the importance of growth but openly admitted to not caring about the novel they wrote their essays about.  The student said “I didn’t like the book and I couldn’t get myself to work hard on the paper.”  To me that was frustrating, but I have to remember that these students are real people.  I know that, even this semester, I did not put all of myself into a paper I wrote for my Shakespeare class because I didn’t like the writing prompt and the story.  However, I did turn the paper in on time.  Unfortunately if my student had at least turned the paper in on time her grade would have been passing.  My CT did stress this point to her and I think that it was clear and will make a difference in her assignments in the future.

Another valuable lesson I am learning has been watching my CT create the guiding questions for the class every day.  This has helped me understand how to connect my students to the texts we are exploring.  This is also assisting me in planning my own lessons for Satire.  Finally, observing my CT giving constructive feedback to the students over their writing unit has helped connect the concepts I learned last semester in 680 into the classroom. 

            

"I think; therefore..." Rene DeCarte

Over the course of the first few weeks of school my seniors have been working on an analytic essay that they wrote over the summer.  People I tell about the assignment are surprised that there is a program that has students working over the summer.  I have to remind my friends that these students are on a college track, many have already been accepted to impressive institutions, and the amount of work they do over the summer is nothing compared to the work they will be expected to complete when they get to university.  That being said, we have now moved on into Existentialism and Hamlet. 

                The class spent a few days learning and annotating an article from the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Existentialism.  My CT gave them a packet that is comprised of the existentialism article, examples of how to annotate a work, and a series of higher level questions to answer.  Honestly, I am not well versed in existentialism so I completed the assignment at home to give myself a better understanding and so that I could assist the students if they needed help.  I also dug out my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and brushed up a bit.  We are teaching existentialism and the absurd in order to give students context as they read Hamlet.  Furthermore, we are teaching annotation so that our students can learn the skill.  They will be required to take notes during Hamlet and then when we move on to The Stranger they will be required to annotate their own copy of the novel for a grade.  I was surprised to find that there are college students and certified teachers who have never annotated a novel and it blew my mind that they would miss out on having that intimate of a conversation with a novel, especially literature.

                Some of my colleagues have expressed that they feel existentialism and the absurd is (1) to difficult of material for Highschool students and (2) they feel like they may be unprepared to teach such a heavy subject, especially in relation to Hamlet.  However, in my opinion if we gloss over existentialism we are doing an injustice to them.  Hamlet is in a similar situation to many of our students.  “To be or not to be” comes to mind.  By teaching existentialism with Hamlet we are helping our students, who are creating their own identity, to create their own identity using existentialism and literature instead of pop-culture and celebrity.

 

                During Thursday’s class period the class was opened for discussion on existentialism and the absurd.  The opening question that my CT posed to them was “What are your ideas of existentialism at this point?”  The conversation went from there on its own.  My CT did ask connecting questions but primarily the discussion was student driven as they discussed and debated their own concept of existentialism.  Some of the best questions were: “What is the burden of facticity?”  “How can paradox be resolved?” “What is the context of religion and science in relation to existentialism?”  How did the reformation effect existentialism or did existentialism influence the reformation?”  And a discussion on herd mentality.  These students are extremely intelligent and challenging them less than we are doing right now would be to fail them.

                Time was given on Friday for the students to review their graded summer essays that they edited in class.  For the most part they did well with the revision process.  No one received below a B.  My CT reviewed what assignments were supposed to be turned in by Friday as we handed back papers.  Time was then given to the students to review and read the comments on their papers.  It was made clear to them that repetitive mistakes do not show growth and that you have to be willing to review several papers together in order to find these types of mistakes.  In addition my CT made sure that the students were aware that they can come in at lunch or after school to discuss their papers in a friendly way and that he would show them how to correct any mistakes in their papers if they had questions.  Afterwards we began Hamlet.

                Hamlet in context was the objective of Friday’s lesson.  Students took Cornell notes while my CT lectured.  Topics covered during the lecture were: Hamlet’s first performance, Elizabethan history, James I, Change and the unknown, reality vs. unreality.  Students were assigned their own parts with my CT reading the part of Hamlet.  My advice to the students was to read with enthusiasm.  Nothing is worse than reading, and listening to someone read, with a monotone, boring, uninterested voice.  We got through Act 1: Scene 1 before class ended, and definitely an exciting start to the year.