Today was a long day, which felt right since this whole week felt like an extremely long week. I guess first weeks back tend to have that feel about them though. I'm glad we get Monday off, but I am not looking forward to the grind that will happen from then until spring break.
When I asked, begged, pleaded, begged, and went Machiavellian to teach blended English and creative writing, I didn't really think about white days. Due to the nature of white days and the classes that meet, I ended up teaching 4 different lessons today with no prep. Now, before any of you feel too awfully terrible for me and want to just give me money, the lesson I taught to my first period class was a repeat of the lesson I taught yesterday to my other English classes. The rest of my lessons I taught to English 12, creative writing, and the Read 180 lab class were new. In English 12 we started reading Slaugher-house and I handed out annotation bookmarks to the class. In an effort to make sure they are reading daily and not just using Spark Notes, I am making them annotate and fill out definitions of unknown words for each reading. I've used this tactic before and it tends to work, but it usually works better after I take the first grade on it and they fail the first quiz. Baby steps, Bob, baby steps.
In creative writing, we each read some different types of poetry that we liked, where it be song, rap, classic poems, or anything else poetic. Many of the students chose music, which I figured since it resonates with them and they really aren't readers of Dickinson or Frost. We then discussed overused metaphors and simlies that have become cliche, such as dead as a doornail, hotter than hell, older than dirt, etc. We listed all these, took out part of it, and replaced it with something else. For example, for older than dirt, dirt was replaced with a teacher's name at school who is older than most. They class had fun with this activity. They then wrote some poetry using some of their remade metaphors and similies.
No comments:
Post a Comment