Question for all board members/moderators

[SgtPepper]

Ehh... you gotta really push it for some.

Yeah.
There were a few that my Latin teacher would sing to annoy the head of the English Department who was big Emily Dickson fan. It was all in good fun though.

[Patrick J]

Talk with the Social Studies teachers you'll be working with and see if you can create some kind of curricular alignment along with the Social Studies courses and curriculum.

For instance, if they're maybe teaching... The Civil War? In the Social Studies room, see if you can fit 'The Red Badge of Courage,' into the Language Arts curriculum. Or if they're doing the English Renaissance align it so that they'll maybe be reading a work by Shakespeare in the English classroom at the same time. Given that it's middle school I'd probably assume you might doing this already. Also consider a level of alignment where maybe if you're doing a unit on Venn Diagrams and Compare and Contrast essays make it so that they'll be writing a Compare and Contrast essay in their Social Studies class and work it so that you may even grade those papers in congress with the Social Studies teacher(s).

And plan for contingencies, don't marry yourself to any one particular standard or objective; allow enough wiggle room so that you can make adjustments, especially if you're going to be teaching students with varying levels of performance, or if you simply find your students being more interested in a particular progress indicator and you might want to go and take a little bit more time to that particular subject if you think it will lead to more enduring understandings.

If nothing else I've always found backwards design really works the best. If you're not already familiar with UbD or Understanding by Design you should take a look into that; establishing and knowing where you want the students to be at the ending of any particular unit, which should be common sense but I've found using UbD makes the process easier, and will make your lesson plans much more copious and vivid, which will no doubt impress your administrators. But I wouldn't make your lesson so detailed that, if you decide to make adaptations, those adaptations can't necessarily be held against you.

Other than that, for an English/Language Arts try to emphasize writing skills more than anything else, because that is a skill I've found to be very difficult for modern students to achieve; writing sadly is becoming a dead art. Encourage independent thinking as much as possible in their writing. To that end I'd say try to have them write as much creative essays as possible, still within the confines of the "rules" of writing, but not making them fall into a "paint by numbers" kind of canned writing.

[RickLM]

My daughter just finished 7th grade. She seemed to love the writing assignments especially, though all of them were very short -- no more than 2 pages apiece. I guess that makes sense if you have some kids who really struggle.

The journal idea might work, though I wonder if the teacher's comments (either about grammar or content) could totally shut a kid down. I remember in college English we had to turn our journals in, and the teacher was disturbed by how depressed I was. I felt like that was an intrusion -- she was there to teach English, not to counsel me. So, journals can be iffy, I think.

For poetry, my daughter really loved Edgar Allan Poe. She also read a lot, but she could choose the book. Usually she chose Harry Potter or some other fantasy book. The requirement was that the student had to read 20 pages per day, and the teacher made up the tests so that she could tell if the kid had really done the reading.

For another assignment, she interviewed me and my wife and then typed it up.

I remember in junior high, one of our literature textbooks had a Twilight Zone script by Rod Serling. That was wonderful to read. For another assignment, we had to match a poem with a piece of art. I chose Conqueror Worm by Poe and used a Frazetta illustration (Conan looking at a giant snake) to go with it.

In terms of non-fiction, there are tons of great books from recent years. Fast Food Nation; The Perfect Storm; We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Shall Be Killed With Our Families (a book about the Rwanda genocide by Gourevitch). But you have to review them first, as junior high parents get ticked if there is risque content or lots of profanity. Seventh graders are only 12-13, so you can't go too close to the edge.

As long as you keep it vibrant, give them great things to read and lots of opportunities to use their creativity, it will go great.

[costello]

I love "Monsters are due on Maple Street."

[Patch]

I love poetry and the kids usually pick up on that. I begin every class with a poem and we either discuss our interpretations of it or pick out various techniques used by the author the piece and make it work (if it works).

Billy Collins anthologized 180 poems from various poets (one poem, roughly, for each day of the school year) in a book called, appropriately enough, Poetry 180.
It's modern poetry with accessible language intended for high school students-- but about a third, maybe half, of the poems would probably work for junior high students as well.
They evoke a wide range of emotions, poems about love, death, loss, loneliness, growing up, nature, sport, war...
A lot of them have a humorous, whimsical touch like Thomas Lux's...

Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City:
Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way turn like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy's elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did on earth.

[Bryan H]

You know, I just realized, and can't believe no one else has suggested it. Doing a week or two on graphic novels might not be a bad idea.

[LenNWallace]

This is a really good point. I really need to make sure non-fiction isn't necessarily informational text. Last year I taught students how to read textbooks, search for main ideas, etc., but it was either that or fiction.

Thank you.

I'd say a good non-fiction example would be In Cold Blood, but... A little bit on the extreme side for eighth graders. Other than that, it's pretty much the quintessential non-fiction book, in my opinion.

[Hock]

All of you have wonderful ideas. Thank you very, very much.

I don't know about Shakespeare. I've taught some before, but like you said, they read the same stuff time and time again in high school.

I think Shakespeare would be good to teach, but mix it up a bit, he wrote more plays the Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. I'd suggest one of his Comedies, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, As you like it, etc.

[Hock]

Also I think it's a good idea to try to get kids away from book reports that are basically plot synopsis's. try to get them to do some critical thinking on their own.

[/(. . )/]

i teach English in Japanese high schools. I try to make everything interesting. sometimes, I let students make their own comics:



if you have 2 characters on a comic, you can put the students in a pair and they have to create a story together. if you have esl students, you can make them act your their scripts.