My English 12 classes were awesome today. I'm not sure what it is with Fridays and epiphanies for me, but I hope they keep coming. In order to help my classes understand how the Tralfamadorians say Earthlings see time, I put up a picture of a mountain range on the screen, but the only part they could see was a 2" diameter section of it. I then put up the whole picture, but I had one student have his eyes closed, and gave him a 3 foot tube of paper that had a bout a 2" diameter opening. I had him look through the paper at the picture, and describe what he saw. I held his head so he couldn't move it around. I then had him take it away and see the whole picture. I could almost see the lightbulbs click on in their heads. We then had a great discussion about what the phrase "Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts" means in the book. Sometimes these kids surprise me.
In CW, I really challenged them. I read two different scenarios of people walking through the woods to a watering hole. The first was of a young boy, and the other a was of an early 20's woman. The pieces were written from the perspective of each person. I had the students compare and contrast the writings, the tone, the voice, the styles, and see if they could determine the age based on how each was written. I then gave them the following sentence: "He/She walked across the fairgrounds". They then had to take one of the two characters and write about a day at the fair from his or her POV using their tone and voice. They seemed to struggle with this, we talked it out and how each may sound, what each would do, and even how the flow of the writing should be. I can tell many of them have never done anything like this before. We have quite a bit of work to do before they get to their short stories.
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