This is the opening lesson for the year for the course.  I am always struck by how often students reference what we do that day - not only later in the school year, but years and years later when they come to visit.  Because this is also the first lesson to be published on this website, I'm hoping to... 

This is the opening lesson for the year, for the course.  It sets the tone - and it (and the ideas contained within) gets visited again and again.

Everything that I became as a teacher - can be traced back to the Folger Shakespeare Library.  This exercise - based on what I learned there - shows students how much they can understand and figure out on their own, by just closely examining the text.

A complex allegory that the students will solve for themselves - with the teacher acting as a "ringmaster" if you will, giving them the components they need - and the confidence.

One of the most important classes of the year.  Gardner's idea of the "Shaper" is introduced & demonstrated - an idea we will come back to again and again this year.  Lots of movement, music, fun and deep thought.

 One of the biggest lessons of the year.  While Candide often seems "cartoon-like" and two-dimensional, there is also a very serious under current that applies so much to the lives that the reader is living. . Students begin by connecting quotes from what we have and will read as well as other works -  and then we come together as a class to discuss them.

If I had to hold one older (pre-twentieth century) text to try and disprove the now almost universally excepted view that only modern, demographically diverse texts can hold interest or "speak" to modern students - this - "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" would be that text.  If you want to see true learning take place in a classroom - this is the work to teach.  I have had so many students over 30 years come in despising Alison (the wife) - finding her manipulative, cruel, even evil.  By the time we look at the text - the context - and listen to some songs - most of us come out of that experience feeling transformed.

We will discuss that day's reading - starting with the students.  Every student (who read) will have a chance to contribute.  One thing that I found, is the fact that they will have to directly contribute to the discussion, makes it even more likely that the students will do the reading (they still get a quiz though).   This section includes the incredible "On the Rainy River".

In one period - the students teach themselves the Elizabethan Country Dance - the Rufty Tufty.  They then go out into the lunch room and perform it for their peers.  This is a lesson about cooperative learning, confidence, letting-go, taking risks, dancing, music, Elizabethan England and having fun.   It is exactly the kind of lesson that build class and individual resiliency.   

Three front-loading lessons may seem like a lot for this novel - and yet (as Leo Gursky would say) if you count the previous book, The Things They Carried - it's really four.  This was the first - and I still think - most important prologue of a lesson that we do.  Why does this book stand out among so many war novel?  Why has it been called the greatest antiwar book of all time.  I believe there is a reason - there is a very specific way to make a text "anti-war", to take away its power to romanticize.  And this is the question that I want in the back of my students' heads as they read.  

A VERY, VERY, VERY important lesson - for so many reasons.  First, these are the  first texts (other than the modern ancillary texts like Grendel) that are written in (early) Modern English.  They do not need to be translated.   We can talk about the words - their relationship to each other, Stephen Booth moments (more on that in a later lesson), and the students can read these poems, pretty much, as they were written.  Another very important reason this lesson is so important has to do with what some of these poems are saying - ideas like "we distract ourselves to not think about the serious things" and the idea of resilience (if you fall you can get up again, stronger). 

It's a radio documentary that first appeared on NPR - put out by Sound Portraits, and it is one of the most moving things that I've ever heard.  The documentary tells the story of Eddie Carmel - a man who was born with a condition that rendered him one of the tallest people to ever live.  He gain a special level of celebrity when he was photographed by Diane Arbus - and his picture (with his "midget appearing" parents in Life Magazine and across the country.  But the documentary focuses on who he was.   

 If the Wyatt and Howard poems are the first poems written in Modern English to be discussed - today we discuss poems - especially "The Nymph's Reply" that are Masterworks (in my opinion) of English (or any other) Poetry.  Sir Walter Raleigh is soooo good - and I believe his poem(s) will strike a chord with nearly every student in the class.   Because these are such big, and inevitable events (at least being touched by them)  in all of our lives - perhaps this is why these poems strike such powerful chord.

Because Persepolis is a different kind (graphic) of novel - it allows the teacher to use a different kind of Vertext  In this case, it is our final discussion of Persepolis - and by using both the texts and the images in the Vertext it gives us a final appreciation for the novel and for the medium.  There is so much in this final discussion - Marji become Marjane and her parents must send her away for her own safety.  She finally realizes how she feels about her family (and  her country) - and the theme that runs through the book (and through this unit) of a "Persepolis" - an ancient world that existed - but now exists only in memory - truly comes to light as that world becomes her childhood.  We also spend the last part of the class going through every student's take-away from the book.

 This lesson - when done right - can be a time for wonder and awe for the teacher and for so much of the class.  Because I've decided to write detailed notes for the Power Point Slides - it's also the lesson that's taken me the longest to get on this site.  I can only do so much each day - the poems - the meanings - the wonder are just so emotional that it drains me (in a very good way).  In any case, this lesson has us go through four of Shakespeare's Sonnets - 18, 30, 29, and 116.  For the first three of these we go through them pretty much line by  line - and then Sonnet 116 is explicated through a very personal story.  

We begin the day by going back to the reading aloud of the play (with Act I, scene 7) and then we read (without a quiz) the first scene in Act 2.  When we get to the right spot in Scene 2 - the students are put into groups (3 or 4 of them) to perform - to act out, the "Is this a dagger that I see before me?" soliloquy from Act 2, scene 2.  There performances are a living Illuminated Text - making Shakespeare's words as clear for the rest of us in the class as possible.  They might be one living dagger - or an evil and good Macbeth - torn between what to do - all the while, saying the words from the soliloquy.  After the performances we talk about what the words mean - and when all groups are done - we finish reading aloud and discussing Act 2, scene 2.  

I begin the Group Work by saying "This is SO cool if you do this right..."  And I mean it - it is very cool and it is very different than anything the students do all year.  For starters - it's a Jigsaw Group Work.  The students will leave their groups after doing some initial close reading of the text - and they will compare what they came up with (each group member will be taking a different "aspect" of the story: its geography, style, Nick's interaction with living things, and chronology), and then go back to their original groups to share that new information.  By answering a few questions (that do some scaffolding) and applying their expertise on the text - they will - on their own - make a huge discovery about "Big Two-Hearted River". 

Perhaps the most important, fun, and exhausting day of the year. The students will next put on their scenes that they've been planning for about a month.  We are in the Theater for an entire day.  Students perform by period - though not necessarily in order of their periods. For those periods when there are no performances - there are activities.  During their lunch period - we all take lunch together, they work with their groups or their friends on a sonnet contest which they get a chance to recite when we return from lunch.  The students always do an amazing job.

Actually,  11 poems, 1 song, and many quotes.  There are many themes and ideas in this gem of a book - and I wanted to introduce as many of them as possible in the verse that we would go over today.  The fact that the unit is less than two weeks and never - unlike most of the books that I taught in World Literature, accompanied by a film.  So planting some ideas of what this novel could be about is largely accomplished in today's poetry class.  I also tried to find - in addition to thematically linked poems - poems that were written by or about women.  The approach is the same of most of our poems before classes.  The students get with a partner or trio and quickly take a look at the poem - then we come back to read the poem aloud and tell us what they thought it meant.  We read the quotes and listen to the song together.

Intellectually, this lesson is the most important that we will do all year.  There may be classes that grab more students in deeply and affecting ways - but without a doubt, the ideas of Stephen Booth will ask students to think deeply and to reject so much of what they've been taught in the English Classroom - from kindergarten onward.  I like to think that all of my unit on Literary Criticism leads up this moment.  All of my class up to this point in the school year (as well as what is to follow) is predicated on the words of Professor Booth.  Put in its most simple terms - it is the words that make Great Literature, great.  Not the stories, not the themes, not its "message".  It is the words - the words that are chosen and how those words are arranged.  Of course - we need that gripping story too - we need tales that address the lives of our students.  The lesson is done as close to a lecture as I ever do in this class - complete with a very interactive Power Point, a short video, and sound effects.

There is no number in front of this lesson - it is not given as the first (though it could be) lesson when we return to the Renaissance.  No, this lesson is conducted when the first beautiful and delicate flowers of the spring, the snowdrops are starting to bloom.  That means you must have a place near you school where you can take your students to see them.  I was lucky enough to have such a spot - though it did change three times over the 30 years that I taught this lesson.  You take the students outside to see these harbingers of spring - you read "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" while out there - and you mention that these flowers they are seeing won't be there in a week - and that should get them thinking.  You return to your classroom, show a video (that you - or I if you want to use the one I made) on what Carpe Diem is - and you read Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress".  You end it with a story or two about what "Carpe Diem" is to you - in a very personal way.  The students - you hope (and so many have told me over the years) - leave your classroom transformed (at least for a little bit, and perhaps longer).

A VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY important lesson.  There that's the second time I've said that - but my students used to tell me I said it for every class.  But, it's true.  I know for a fact that this lesson - and this poem won many students over to poetry throughout the years.  And there are only two poems that are covered in the lesson.  The first - though well written is pretty misogynistic and cynical.  The second - well, the second, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" is one of the greatest poems ever written in English.  Like most of Donne's poetry, it speaks across the ages - and students can identify with its sentiment - and it can give them hope (like so many of the poems that we cover) in a sea of sadness.  Though I ask many questions directed at the students in this lesson - this is perhaps as close to being a lecture (not a dirty word) as I got all year - without it actually being one.

Now that the students have made summaries of their excerpt from Milton's Paradise Lost - it is time to get them up on their feet and have them act it out.  The truly great thing about this two-day process is that by the end of it (including a very short discussion after today's activity) they will have an excellent understanding of Milton's text.  In order to make yesterday's summaries - they needed to understand what was going on in the text.  Today - by acting out their summaries - they will not only be checking on yesterday's work - they will also be showing another deep understanding of Paradise Lost.  

 One of my favorite lessons for one of my favorite units.  In fact, students would come back 20 years after they had my class - and the beginning of today's lesson would stick out in their heads.  I owe so much of this lesson - and everything that I did in this unit to my wonderful Professor at UIC, Gene Ruoff - to whom I dedicate this unit on this unit on the Romantics.
The lesson begins with a demonstration involving darkness and light (see my description below) - this is what students really remember and I have to say, it is pretty cool.  We then talk about what makes the Romantic Era, the Romantic Era.  We discuss (briefly) Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Next, we read the first poem in that collection: "My Heart Leaps Up", and talk about what it means.  We then read our only nonBritish poem of the year - "A Child Went Forth" by Walt Whitman - and we read it as we walk through the halls of my school, observing the people around us as we read (and go forth).  When we make it back to our room, I play the song "The Cat's in the Cradle" and the students put this together with everything else that we've done so far that day.  I tell a very personal story about rainbows and the wonders of small children seeing their first one - and we end the class with Eva Cassidy's incredible "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."