Sophomores vs. Juniors

The other day I was thinking about how my student teaching experience would be different if the order of my classes was reversed. Right now, I teach a 10th grade class during 4th period and an 11th grade class during 5th. I seem to have far less management issues with my juniors compared to my sophomores. Usually ending my day with the juniors leaves me feeling more hopeful and confident about my future as a teacher. I have a feeling that if I ended the day with my 10th graders, though, I'd be banging my head against a wall.

There are a bunch of factors that could be playing a role in this all. I've spoken to one of my master teachers about this a number of times. (She also teachers 10th and 11th graders.) Some of the factors I feel like I've had little control over such as the control each master teacher had over the classes during the first semester, the seating arrangement in the 10th grade class promotes talking, the fact that juniors are just more mature than sophomores. Perhaps even taking over a text that my master teacher had begun in the first semester played a role in the difference. I was able to get a fresh, clean start with my juniors.

I still keep learning the different things that work and that don't work with my sophomores. It seems like my sophomores control themselves best at the opening of class if I begin the class with "important announcements," usually information about upcoming tests or assignments. So many students in that class do not take the in class writing/journal writing prompts as seriously when I begin class with them. I've also realized that beginning class with a short pop quiz will also corrale the students.

One thing I've noticed that doesn't really work with my sophomores is group work. I've tried "counting off" to make more random groups. Many students completely ignored what numbers they had and formed their own groups. Although doing things like handing out group instructions to each student improved the way the group work went, a number of students make it difficult to let the class separate into various groups.

I guess the good thing is that I'm actually getting a feel for what works and what doesn't work. The disruptions that occur during class just seem to get me down a little bit though, especially when they occur while other students are trying to read. I guess I just need to keep building my arsenal of strategies to deal with disruptive behavior, but thank goodness I end the day with my juniors!

Movie Reviews

One thing that excites me about something that has happened in class is that I feel like I've had a success with an assignment I came up with, but I also feel like I can improve the way the assignment works the second time around. Basically, I had students begin by writing movie reviews for a movie of their own choosing. We had looked at a movie review for The Crucible earlier in the semester to figure out possible structural features of a movie review. After reading the first few chapters of Catcher in the Rye, I had students write a movie review about the same movie, but this time from the perspective of Holden Caulfield, the narrator and main character of the book. We looked closely at tone, diction, and the use of slang among other things to prepare for writing in his point of view. The results were pretty impressive. The majority of the movie reviews sounded both believable and original. One of my favorites was a review of Casino Royale, the new James Bond movie. Boy, was that a good movie review. He was both complaining about how James Bond was some phony British spy, but in the review he also admitted how James Bond was pretty handsome. That was a subtle little thing that Holden does in the text that I was glad a student picked up on.

The biggest thing about these movie reviews was that they were so much fun to read. I've procrastinated in actually grading them, but I've read through all of them already just for enjoyment, and have read a few others several times. They kill me.

If I were to do this again, I'd really want to work the Internet into the equation, but I'm not sure what would be the best place to organize all of these movie reviews. Blogs do not necessarily seem like the ideal format for these movie reviews unless it were an ongoing process throughout the year. It's possible that I could have students return to these movie reviews later in the year, writing from the perspectives of other important characters from our readings such as George or Lennie from Of Mice and Men. If I stick to just using the reviews for Catcher in the Rye, though, I'm thinking I would want to have students sign up for some sort of free message board/forum. I've only looked around briefly for nice message board/forum setups where I could have students post their movie reviews for their classmates to read and respond to. I haven't exactly fallen in love with any message board formats just yet. (Let me know if you have any good links I should check out.)

Using a message board as the arena for these movie reviews would allow students to take a little more pride in their movie reviews and also make more realizations about the way Holden writes, speaks, and thinks. A number of students in the class are still reluctant to volunteer to share their own writing in class, so using the forum approach would allow students to avoid any extra anxiety. It would probably also save a little class time. I'm thinking we could go to the computer lab once to register for the forum and begin writing rough drafts of their movie reviews and another time to post their reviews and begin responding to each other's reviews. I would probably assign each student to respond to a specific movie review and let them choose at least two other reviews to respond to in order to avoid some posts from not getting any replies. The message board would be accessible to students while they are at home as well, so they could have time to read as many movie reviews as many times as they wish. These movie reviews were a lot of fun. I really recommend doing something like this for Catcher in the Rye because it plays such a large role in the novel, but I suppose this assignment could work with any first-person novel or with characters who have a memorable way of speaking. I'm excited to try to work this technological aspect into this activity the next time around.

Stump the Chump

I recently started teaching Catcher in the Rye in my Junior American Lit class, I can't believe how much fun I've been having. The last major work we read in class was The Crucible, and to get everybody to read this novel differently, I gave a quiz that required students to recall specific and subtle details from the book. Since this was a big change from mostly all of the other quizzes I'd given in the past, I felt like I should do something to make it up to the students or to let them have their own fun. So we played a little game called Stump the Chump.

This is something I pretty much stole from my favorite English teacher in high school. Back then we were reading Slaughterhouse Five, and my teacher told us to all write 10 "quiz" questions of our own that ask for really specific and obscure details from the novel. We then competed against other groups to stump our teacher for extra credit. I still remember asking my teacher what was the color of the owl that Billy Pilgrim walks past, and he said "Jade green" with no effort at all. I thought I had stumped him, but he nailed it.

I won't say how many hours I spent preparing for this game, but I will say that I wouldn't have been able to do it if there were credential classes this week. Anything from the first 9 chapters in the book was fair game (Exactly 66 pages). In class I put the students into 6 groups, and let the controlled madness begin. Out of about 30 questions, they only stumped me twice, and actually only one group was responsible for both of the questions I couldn't answer correctly. (To defend myself one of them was a 2 part question, and the other was just pretty vague.) All the students were engaged. Multiple students read questions for their groups, and some students even stood up to ask me the questions. There were a lot of smiles throughout the game, huddled students conferring over what question to ask next, and others flipping through the pages of the novel like madmen to find harder questions to ask me. I feel like I've really succeeded at getting a large majority of these kids to enjoy the novel.

I can't remember the first question they asked me, but I know that it wasn't too difficult. I still played it up, though, pretending that I had trouble remembering what the answer was. Students were pretty excited at first to see me struggle, but when I said the answer a lot of students seemed to be shocked that I could remember something so "trivial." The game was fun for me. I had an excuse to be extra animated in class. For students, I feel like it's always good for them to see their teacher in vulnerable situations where the teacher can possibly make a fool out of him or herself. This game was a lot of fun for me and for most of the students. If you have a crazy amount of time to prepare in one night, I definitely recommend playing something like this. I can see this game working really well if you're a full-time teacher that teaches multiple sections of the same class. By the third or fourth time, you'll really be in the zone and know every kind of question a student could ask you. I honestly cannot wait until I can teach Catcher in the Rye again to another group of kids to see how they compare to the Juniors I have right now. So much fun.