Monday, October 18, 2010
Week 9, Pedagogy
This week, I am working to convince my students that poetry is a useful form of writing. Working with my student teacher, we developed lessons where we are reading poems in class required by the GPS, then we are having the students select lines to use as a starter. Although I had some rather good images "The city smells like crumbling buildings"-student and "the post it notes of life stare back through the cave"-student, for the most part, students were confused. I wonder if I went wrong somewhere. Perhaps we didn't work to establish a basis for this work, and so the students are confused about their purpose and their goal. The performance standards focus strongly on literature content, but when it comes to writing, they are more vague. I wonder, should I have done other exercises to set this up before actually having students write?
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They should be confused. I know I was when we started with this class. Keep at it, they will get it as long as you keep going. Try the emo poem, my kids loved that and talk about the triggering town, my kids really got into that idea for skit writing.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you might try multitasking different calisthenics. I had great success with that because my students were to busy to complain about being confused, and when class was over they had produced a lot of good material.
I chose to have students do improving or skiving off of poems and play in their seats and also set up a table for students in the middle to do the passing of literature material.
I kept them going back and forth between these two things so quickly and for most of the period that they did not have time to ask questions. With high school kids it is sometimes best to keep them doing things fast so that they do not have time to talk or think to much, especially since like most of the rest of us we learn this best by doing it not talking about it.