American Literature Units

Next year I'm teaching American Literature to juniors.  The last time I taught the course was my first year teaching, so there are quite a few things I'd like to do differently.

This will also be the first summer I've had a solid job set up for next year.  I won't be spending my time completing applications for dozens of districts or signing up for licensure tests to add endorsements that are contingent for my employment.

So, because I'm a little sick¹, I already started putting together a basic year-long plan aligned with standards.

I was feeling good and wanted to nail down some overarching questions for the full year, because that would be cool.  Overarching questions are like essential questions that cover the whole year - the "so what?"  I had one, but I wanted some other ideas and decided to consult some literature from my undergrad to make sure I remembered how to select overarching questions.

So I pulled out Teaching English Through Principled Practice by Peter Smagorinsky and found the section on overarching questions, which gave me some ideas, and looked through the chapter on year long units².

Smagorinsky (2002) states there are three ways to set up a years worth of units.  There are all out teacher selected or where students craft all the units.  Then, there is the middle ground:

In this approach to choosing a curriculum, the teacher sets up a menu of possible topics, allowing the students to select eight or so for their year's study . . . This approach has the advantage of giving the students choices in their learning while operating in a framework of topics that the teacher considers culturally and educationally important (p. 36).

I had considered doing this my first year teaching, but Smagorinsky (2002) warns against it:

It is often a good idea to wait a few years before taking this approach so that you will have several units prepared, rather than having to write many new units from scratch in your first or second year on the job (p. 36).

After teaching for five years in three different districts, I'm ready to skin this chicken.  Peel this potato.  Gut this fish.  I am all over this like ham on cheese.  And apparently in need of a snack.

Here's where you, my dear readers, come in.  Having taught American Literature only once, and for just a semester, as a first year teacher, I need a list of American Literature units.  I've got 26 ideas right now on this Google doc.  Some are bad, some are better.  I also need texts I could teach with them.  No idea is too questionable.  From this I can put together a final list and say to my students in September⁴, "Choose your top ten."

Works Cited
Smagorinsky, P. (2002). Teaching English through principled practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

1. You can use the common interpretation or the student vernacular. Go back.
2. My current favorite quote from this book: "You'll probably end up teaching the selections in an order quite different from their order in the anthology.  Such is the life of the maverick" (p. 87).³ Go back.
3. I teach mostly with mavericks . . . wait, doesn't that go against the definition?
4. Yeah, that's right, suckas!  I don't start school until after Labor Day!⁵ Go back.
5. Makes working until mid-June worth it.

Plot Line Video

I recently made a video that show examples of different points in the plot line for my class.  Hopefully you can use it too.  Here's the link.

Narrative Essay - Step One: The Writer's Notebook

Photo by Grassroots Group on Flickr, some rights reserved.

Writer's notebooks are the first step I took towards changing the way I teach all writing, including moving away from five-paragraph essays.

Over the last year, I've been thinking a lot about writing instruction that is authentic and closer to the process "real" writers go through¹; the non-prescriptive² pre-writing that creates a solid bedrock of thoughts ready to be mined for high quality topics to be refined into short stories or cut and polished into poems.

The mold for where this bedrock can be formed, I'd argue, is the writer's notebook (WNB) as opposed to what some classes call the journal or diary.  It's different in the type of writing that goes in.

What I refer to as a journal contains writing on prompts selected by the teacher, or, when it's an option, whatever the student wants to write about: their weekend, or the basketball game the night before.  This is good - getting students to write daily or multiple times per week is research-driven good practice and will make students better writers.  But there are some disadvantages to this model³.

Journals don't contain what students value.  They get the student to write, or they act as a primer connecting yesterday's lesson to today's.  But at the end of the year (or a month in), the student asks themselves, "so why am I doing this?"  Beyond the grade they get and the lessons we teach⁴, the journal isn't valued by our students.  It isn't something most of them will want to save.

Journals aren't connected to a long-term process.  The work that goes into a journal rarely extends beyond that day's warm-up.  Warm-ups are good.  But maybe student-writing time should be at a different time⁵.

Journals don't assess students' writing ability.  Journals judge a student's ability to write about something they don't value (see above) because we tell them to.

Journals aren't authentic.  Journals aren't where published writing takes place.  Students don't take their responses to these prompts and revise them into polished pieces.

So here's how I set up a WNB this year.  All those journal prompts?  You still need them, because students coming into class at the end of the summer aren't going to churn out a lot of writing.  They need to work up to it.  So the first day I give them some of those journal prompts to choose from, and I ask for just four lines (from my 10th graders).  The next day, I ask for 5 or 6.  We continue this until we're at half a page.  I may take a breather here, ask for half a page for a week.  Then start to ratchet it up to a full page.

This is what Aimee Buckner calls the Daily Page - students writing a full page each day.  In her book Notebook Know-How: Strategies for the Writer's Notebook (2005), Buckner offers a couple strategies for students to use to come up with their own topics.  Some of my favorites:

Writing from a List  I use this one in my class frequently.  Students make a list of the top ten best things that have happened in their life and the top seven worst.  Then star the ones they could write about.  Then choose one to write about that day.

Observations  What do you notice using your five senses?  The sweaty smell of the kid who had gym class last period.  The grinding pencil sharpener next door.  Write about it.

Conversation  Write a conversation between you and someone or something else.  Here's part of my conversation with a pen:

Me: Hello, pen.
Pen: I don't talk.
Me: Um . . . you just did.
Pen: No, I didn't.
Me: Yes, you did. You just talked again.
Pen: No, that's just a figment of your imagination.
Me: But if I look back, I have what you said. See?
Pen: . . .
Me: See? . . . See?
Pen: Okay, okay. So I talk. So what?
Me: I just wanted to see how you were doing.
Pen: Fine.
Me: Oh. That's good.
Pen: Is that all?
Me: And I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your continuous ink flow.

So those are great, because students can choose the topic, but it's not something like "This weekend, I . . ."  A conversation with a pen might not produce something that goes to the next step.  But a conversation with your father who left you when your were 10?  That could go somewhere.  That's something I'd want to read.  These prompts create bedrock for mining - not everything will be good.  But some of it will be.

In addition to those options, I give students a list of prompts from Inside Writing (2005) by Donald Graves and Penny Kittle.  One of my favorites: Think about a photograph you feel a strong emotional connection to, one of: a family gathering, you and your grandfather, your first communion, a day at the beach.  Tell who is in the photo and why you treasure it.

These prompts are different from the typical ones we write on the board at the beginning of class.  This prompt got me to write a coming-of-age story about a friend and mentor I worked with at summer camp and who greatly influenced the person I became.  It's something people want to read about.

That's the point of the writer's notebook.  Push back in the comments.  Next week I'll write about how I got students to choose a topic and rewrite it - but it's straight out of Inside Writing, if you'd rather get it from the source.

1. Everyone's a real writer, but I'm talking about professional writers, in this case.  I guess. Go back.

2.  So here's my prescription of how to do it.  Geez. Go back.

3. I am looking for a fight on this, because I'm moving away from journals myself and I others to force me to think about this deeply.  So bring it on in the comments, please. Go back.

4. Which, in many cases, are more dear to us than to our students - at least for me. Go back.

5. Full disclosure: this is an idea that just came to me.  I'll try it out and let you know how it goes. Go back.