First, I think it's funny that you wrote that students "quickly take their seats." I was a little antsy at how slow they were, to be honest. Overall, I thought they were fine.
Just to make sure that we're both clear on how the lesson was to work: On Thursday, I received "notes" from students that were simply lines of "Fireflies" written down on paper with no description whatsoever. So, Friday's lesson was based on teaching them how to take notes (e.g., applying proper labels, writing necessary terms and explanations, etc.) and seeing if they could do significant work to understand "Charge of the Light Brigade" on their own. So, the idea of Monday's lesson was to clarify misunderstandings and to have them revisit their notes to see if they successfully completed the note-taking task.
I'm mostly responding to your notes here: while I'd love to teach the themes of the poem and things like that, as we discussed on the phone, I simply can't do it. The lack of comprehension by the students often prevents me from doing the more meaningful stuff. In an ideal world, the solution to this is to have lecture-type videos of the poetry lessons online so students can access them at home and receive the comprehension piece, then we can do the more meaningful aspects of poetry in class. Unfortunately, the demographics that we have at New Cumberland require teachers not to require anything that necessitates internet access. Similarly, in most cases, I can't have the students preview the poem at home and figure it out for homework because they simply won't do it. This could be an ideal situation for a reward system similar to Heather's -- if we give them something concrete to work towards, we might increase the positive pressures for students to do their homework. Again, the demographics are a bit of a problem with that idea, too, because of certain students' situations at home.
The problem that I have at the moment is our schedule from PSSAs is brutal as far as instruction. If we're lucky, we get a half hour with a class. If we're not, it's anywhere from 15-25 minutes (which is only half of a regular period). In other words, this poetry unit should have been done tomorrow, but instead it will go until Friday. The joys of scheduling for middle school <3
Regardless, I feel like the lesson went pretty well overall. I've had better and had worse, but I was happy with the way a large number of students performed on the assignment I gave them. Though I didn't want to take two days on that one poem, it was valuable experience for them.
"while I'd love to teach the themes of the poem and things like that, as we discussed on the phone, I simply can't do it. The lack of comprehension by the students often prevents me from doing the more meaningful stuff."
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure about this. To me, this is an "in the moment response"--caught up in what students can or can't do based on whether they can possibly know everything there is to know about a poem and its themes. One co-op (not yours, though the point is relevant here) talked to me about student teachers fretting too much over students "getting" the content, and contending that "until they get it, they can't think critically about it"--or in other words, climb the taxonomy. We agreed that there are ways to get students critically engaged and connected to a poem/story/etc. without focusing so much on whether or not they can call out the plot from letter A to Z.
Students need context, sure. But, we can help them make meaningful connections without so much focus on explication, literary constructs, etc.
Truly, if a student can connect to a work, then he/she has a better chance of understanding the meaning and how the literary constructs contribute to that meaning.