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.
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