Day 47: That Doesn't Really Answer The Question...

Agenda-
Homeroom
Class: Creative Writing
Class: Pre-AP Sophomore English
Class: AP Senior English
Lunch
Study Hall

Creative writing went well. All of the students worked in their groups on their group quest stories. My group managed to get 3 more pages written in our story. We should be done pretty soon and then we can work on editing. It is always amazing to me how much creating and on task work gets done in this class. I wish I could get my other classes to do this kind of work all the time. It is obvious that the difference is that this is a class where everyone is excited to be doing the work.

After creative writing I had the sophomores. They are working on Night now. They had read the first chapter and I tried to use their passage reflections to get a good discussion going. It didn’t go so well. The students seemed reluctant to share in the large group format. They also didn’t seem to have much to add to their classmates’ passages. I need to try something different next time. Meg suggested doing something similar to what I am doing with the seniors. Giving the sophomores a question to explore, then having them in groups discuss which of their passages best answer the question and of course what the answer is. Definitely sounds like a good to guide their discussion to me. Now I need to go through Night and figure out what I want them to consider in each chapter. So far their presentations have been very good. Maybe I can tie those in too somehow? I need to think about this more still. I have also noticed that the Holocaust Victim cards did not go over well. I had to explain to them several times how they were supposed to get two reflections out of their cards. They were very confused. I think they finally understood in the end though. I will have to try to explain it better to the next class. This was a good practice run.

The senior class had some good presentations. Again there was a range of presenting styles and comfort levels. There weren’t as many this time though and we had more time so we were able to get through them all and get to talk about the book. They picked some very strange passages to answer my question. I asked them to look at how Aurora Leigh defines poetry. They picked passages about greenery and dead mothers. I am not sure why they did that. There were plenty of other passages to pick from that said the words poetry, books, and words in them. I think this group may need more help in picking appropriate passages. I am going to see how they do with the second question now that they have seen how their passages will guide our class discussion and then go from there. Maybe I will do a workshop with them on how to address prompts like the ones they are doing over their reading.