Day 27- "Call me Ishmael"- Moby Dick

For a white Wednesday full of teaching, this was a pretty solid day. In English 12, I covered introductions and effective leads. I was able to put into practice the lesson I taught this summer at the Hoosier Writing Project, and I think it went fairly well in all my classes. I combined the lesson I used last for teaching introduction and I bettered it by using my demo from the HWP and what I learned in that amazing 13 days. For this lesson, we discussed as a class what makes a good beginning to a book or movie and what elements of those really captivate us. I then showed a few different types of leads in movies, and we talked about what made them interesting. I then asked them to tell me if they could remember any books they have read in school or for pleasue (um yeah, right) and how they began. There were very few examples since the vast majority of my student's daily intake of words comes from Twitter, but almost all of them remembered how To Kill a Mockingbird begins. They read this book as freshmen, and even the ones who claimed they never read a word of it remembered how it began with Jem having a broken arm. We discussed how to turn these concepts from books and movies into an interesting introductory paragraph for an expository essay. I showed them a model introduction I wrote if I was writing an essay on a destination as will be their first assignment. To end class, I had them write an introduction for their essays. I told them this didn't have to be perfect introduction and they should revise their writing anyway, but I want to see if they have the correct elements for an introduction. I'm hoping I don't see any of these introductions on their actual essays because that means they are at least revising in some way. Baby steps I guess.