I retired in 2008 after 37 years of teaching. In that time, I taught every grade level, but spent the final twenty years with juniors and seniors, including the AP class. I also served as the gifted ed co-ordinator for the rural PA district. An old friend urged me to share some ideas/lessons that my students seemed to respond to (or for the Warriner's devotees, to which my students seemed to respond). I was lucky in that my students were great young people who trusted that what I was doing was going to help them. Years went by between discipline problems.
A little background: about halfway through my career, I was asked to leave the junior high and take the senior English classes, which included a new AP course. I was made gifted teacher also. I was unprepared, and did a poor job that first year. With some help from Duke's TIP program, I returned with a new mindset, and started teaching with a poster of Bloom's tax on my back wall. The goal was to foster higher order thinking skills. I started each new school year's class with the first short story I was assigned in college, "The Use of Force," a William Carlos Williams (very) short story about a doctor who makes a house call and forces a young girl's mouth opened to check for diptheria. I used this story for both my highest and lowest performing classes.
The lesson: I passed out copies of the story, and read it aloud to the students. After that, I distributed a "theme analysis worksheet," which comprised eight simple questions designed to help students think analytically about any story. The worksheet looked like this:
1. External conflict (s)? (doctor vs child, mother vs father, for ex).
2. Internal conflict? (doctor vs doctor).
3. Most important conflict? (here I talked about escapist (external conflict) and interpretive (internal) literature. In this case, the doctor vs himself is most central to theme.
4. Abstract terms in conflict? Students gave many here, but "rage vs calm" and "anger vs reason" and "love vs hate" etc were among the most mentioned.
5. Most important abstract conflict? It really doesn't matter, but let's say "anger vs reason."
6. Choose the winning abstract of question 5 (Anger).
7. Why did you choose this abstract? In the story, the doctor loses control of his sense of reason and overpowers the young girl, even as he realizes he should leave and return later.
8. Theme? The answers to 6 and 7 should lead to an easy theme statement--"-Often, even the most rational people lose control of their better judgement," for ex. Or "Anyone can lose it completely." Or more simply, "Anger often triumphs over reason."
The length of this lesson was always about 40 minutes. If time permitted, I told students that they loved stories, even if they didn't think so. They are attuned to wanting to hear and create stories. Words just aren't words. As an example, I told them, "In a few seconds, I'm going to give you two words. They are just words and have no connection. Ready? Okay, 'baby' & 'lawnmower.'" I would wait a few seconds and say, "Those were just words, but my guess is you put them together into a story. How many of you pictured the lawn mower rolling toward the baby?" Everyone :)
This would sometimes lead to a discussion of enjoying gossip, etc. But mainly, I was trying to get them to accept that, believe it or not, they really do love literature.
Day 2 would be a continuation of theme analysis, but this time on their own with the (again, very) short story "Regret" by Kate Chopin ( classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/kchopin/bl-kchop-regret.htm).
Note: My wife, newly retired, was a far better English teacher than I. Her junior students had an almost unbelievable success rate on PA's state assessment test. She will also contribute to the blog.
Hope this finds its way to helping a few classes.
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