The Staircase of Complexity

Recently, I've been asked to outline the shifts in the ELA common core.  And as I turn to grade actual student work,  I can't help but  feel a bit as though I've been pushed down this staircase of complexity.  There are so many times when I wish I could do what all English teachers fantasize about:  throw the papers down the stairs.  The papers that make their way all the way to the bottom must be better developed -- or at least heavier -- and so they are awarded an A.  Those that float to the top... well, somebody's got to be on the wrong side of the curve.

I've tried many strategies to make my comments meaningful.  But research shows that students rarely read teacher comments.  I've created videos and voice recordings, and these are much more effective.  They are a little closer to a conference.  But there's nothing that develops complex understanding more than one-on-one instruction.   If only I could find the time.  If only those standards did something to support educators and schools in created time and space for such writing conferencing.  Well, as my sister, a primary teacher, sometimes reminds me, shift happens.

Hamlet's Twitter Feed

Last year, my AP Literature students decided that Oedipus should have a Twitter feed.  So we created one on the bulletin board.  It was screaming hilarious.  One post read, "LMS if you love your mother."  Hamlet "liked" this.  Another post read, "That awkward moment when you find out that your wife is your mother #awkardfamilyphotos" and so on.  So this year, as we've begun to consider Hamlet and the concept of the mutability of language, I've decided to start a Twitter feed (on my classroom wall) for Claudius, Hamlet, and Ophelia.  Claudius' posts are in blue, Hamlet's in green, and Ophelia's in pink.  Comments to posts can be added in small yellow post-its.  I thought I'd track the progress of the feeds on this blog. The first post, students created together as an example:  "Should I wear black?  #so numb  Or... black."  This is pictured above.  Ophelia commented back, "SMH."

When I looked back at the previous year's Oedipus Twitter project, I shared with students that what made the posts so funny, the timely allusions to pop culture, no longer exist in their teenage collective mind only a year later.  So this project should really extend through a year's time to come to the better understanding of Hamlet's frustration with the mutability of language and the ways in which a single spoken word can be heard differently.  And, this mutability is also the reason that Shakie's comedies aren't so funny to us.  We, too, have lost the humor popular to Shakie's audience.

This isn't an assignment; it is organic and fun.  Even after this picture was taken, I returned to my classroom to find that Ophelia had commented "Should I get my hair wet?"  I discovered that this was contributed by a freshman student from another class that I teach who happened to be familiar with the play.  Everyone is welcome to contribute, and the result will, I hope, be as funny, and in some cases, as astute, as it was last year.  Stay tuned...

Frankenstein

I continue to struggle with when to let the students discover a text without (some, all, any, ?) guidance.  Even Frankenstein and his creature lament that their lack of proper guidance leaves them, ultimately, misguided.  Nonetheless, after their first reading, I asked AP senior students to create maps of the text before we discussed the text as a class.  With few exceptions, they recognized the structure of the text and how the structure created meaning.  As I mentioned before, I was interested in their assumption that knowledge is, according to Shelley, inherently dangerous.  That's were we started our discussions.

A Brave New World

In the beginning...  I think I taught Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going?  Where Have You Been?" a few times before I realized that the students didn't understand Connie's symbolic attempt to reconnect to her mother as she screams into the phone.  My students had never used -- to any real degree -- a phone that was connected to anything!  So I was tickled to discover at a local antique store a whole volume of books dedicated to the telephone!  How appropriate that we have moved into Frankenstein at the same time.  As they are awakening to possibility, we have been talking about what it means to have access to knowledge that we haven't learned to understand or control.  Their maps reveal their own concern with what they labeled "dangerous" knowledge.