week 4: on the eve of week 5

Whoops! I let the week get away from me! Quick recap:

Week 4 was a week in which I realized that it is trickier to put freshmen into groups than I previously thought. Here's what it sounded like in my classroom on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Me: Okay, now I want you to get into groups of 4. How about, you 4, you 4, you 4 etc.
Students: [silence]
Me: I mean, push your desks together and get into groups.
Students: [blank stares, some lethargic movement that eventually ended in groupings of 4]

They are so funny. Funny haha and funny strange.

Big news: I had my FIRST MAJOR DISCIPLINARY ISSUE this week.

It involved the aforementioned group activity, in which I gave each group posterboard, coloring materials, and relatively simple directions: to draw and color an image from the story, with 2 quotes from the story, that capture the mood of the short story. So simple, a fun end-of-the-week activity.

But for 1 group of 3 boys, who were goofing around the whole class time, the temptation to add a little something extra to their drawing was too much.

When I went over to check on them, I found myself looking at a very bloody rendering of the violent climax of the story, with an extra addition: a thought-bubble from one of the stick figures, with a bed - a stick figure - and a dog. In. That. Order.

I was ticked. I really was upset by this. I was so upset that I got onto them pretty intensely (for me) and told them that unless they came to seminar and redid the assignment individually (free of creepy suggestive images), each boy would get a zero. Two of them came in, two didn't. 1 of the absentees had football, and the other just didn't show. I think I'll give those two 1 more chance before it goes down in history in the gradebook.

Oh, the joys of teaching English to goofy/creepy freshman boys.

In other news: I went to a GIFTED IEP meeting, which is quite the opposite of a regular IEP meeting. These Individualized Education Plan meetings involve the student, their parents, and their teachers. I only stayed for 15 minutes because there was literally nothing I had to worry about for this high-performing student. So different from last week's IEP meeting, in which the student is being encouraged to just make C's so he can pass this 3rd round of English 9.

Plans for this week: Learning about characterization in Langston Hughes' "Thank You, Ma'am" and Judith Ortiz's "American History." We will examine Facebook profiles and how they share DIRECT characterization (name, date of birth, personal info) as well as INDIRECT characterization (profile picture, people they are friends with, things people write on their wall). Then we will make FB profiles (the paper version) for characters in the stories we've read so far. A teensy bit of Web 2.0 making its way into my classroom, finally!


on what makes a book:

"To those who know and love them, books are recognizable, as as forests are, and cities, by their structure (branching and rebranching), their complexity (enormous), and their size (big enough to get lost in). A book is usually something we can carry in one hand, yet if it is a real book it is also larger than we are: a city or forest of words that can feed us and swallow us up and transform us. A book is not a catalogue or list; it has to make more sense than that. It is not a stack of cordwood but a tree: a branching, leafing, flowering structure, unfolding in the mind, where it can find the space it needs." - Unknown (Kyle, who wrote this incredible thing?!)