Shakespeare and Spidey

I’m an English teacher in an urban high school. I’m currently working on a unit with my senior classes about decision making.  One of our touchstone texts for the unit is Hamlet.  I could have given my students two choices for the study - A) here’s the book, now go home and read various acts to yourself, or as I’ve done so many times before - B) we’re going to read this aloud in class since “it’s a play and should be performed.”

Then this. 

I read “Stop Reading Whole Class Novels” by a blogger called Mr. Chase.  In it, the author points out that despite what a curriculum or lesson plan says, every student is never doing every assignment.  Devastating to a teacher who likes to point out to the one or two students who get caught not doing the reading that they are probably the only students in the history of my career who didn’t do an assignment. So the question became, how do I teach my students Hamlet without having them read Hamlet the way I had taught it so many times before? 

So I started developing projects around the concept of decision making, which is really what this unit has always been about. I decided my students watch the PBS video “Shakespeare Uncovered: Hamlet with David Tennant”.  It’s an engaging look at the character as well as the actors who have played him.  It covers a lot of the plot as it seeks to determine why a 400-year-old play is still as relevant and popular as it is. The video is supplemental in nature, and when discussing major soliloquies or scenes, we open the play and read as a class.  From there, we can analyze and discuss the importance to the characters and plot. 

When the video discussed Hamlet and the concept of a son vowing revenge for his father’s murder, I cheered inside when one of my seniors, Tommy (a notorious non-reader), connected the concept to Spiderman.   

I cheered outwardly when one of his classmates, Amory (who I often admonish for his treatment of desk as pillow), questioned him on it, and he defended it with the example of Norman Osborne’s death and Harry Osborne’s subsequent vow to kill Spiderman, his father’s murderer. 

I stood on my chair and watched as the conversation began to spread through the room.  Dyllon told him it wasn’t the same because the Osbornes were villains, and Hamlet was the good guy.  That didn’t jive for Tre, as being on a revenge mission against a murderer doesn’t automatically make you the good guy - after all, Hamlet was letting his emotions get the best of him, and he ends up killing Polonius. 

Speaking of Polonius, the students have embraced the advice he gives to his son, Laertes. They have been creating reverse memes to demonstrate what the advice means.  (Reverse memes are what I refer to as using pre-written words with found images rather than what they do with meme creation in which they take a picture and add their own words.)  

Here’s an example from a student:

 

Once the students have created these, they will view them, art-gallery-style, and analyze what about the picture is representing the words.  Going back to our original purpose in the unit - what led the creator of the piece to make the decision he or she made.

I’m still feeling out this new way of teaching Hamlet through a lens rather than for the sake of it’s-third-marking-cycle-and-I-have-to-teach-this-play-now.  It’s out of my comfort zone due to its newness, and there are days I worry that I’ve underprepared.  What my students are showing me is that I don’t have to fill the areas I perceive as gaps.  They are eager to have a voice in this because of how they are engaging in the work.  It’s been a rejuvenating lesson. 

Benchmarking My Principles

On Monday and Tuesday of last week, our department was directed to administer benchmark assessments for Unit 3 of the model curriculum of the New Jersey Department of Education, which was developed in response to the Common Core Standards. This marked the third time this year that instruction was interrupted to administer these benchmarks. For units one and two, we were instructed that the students would be given two class periods to complete the assessments. We teach an A-day, B-day block schedule, so we lost 8 days of instruction for both benchmarks.

Furthermore, the board office is interested in seeing the progress on the benchmark scores, and they issued a mandate that the results are disaggregated within a week. The problems here pile quickly.
1) With over 120 students, the workload is huge. You can’t forget that there are other assignments in the “to do” pile as well, so despite their perceived importance by the higher-ups in the district, they’re just another method of assessment used by the classroom teachers.
2) The instrument needs to be analyzed beyond grades by looking at individual questions to see where group deficiencies lie in order to determine what SLO’s (Student Learning Objectives) need to be revisited and retaught. This problem exists with some extended problems.
2A) Each unit in the Model Curriculum has a duration of 6 weeks, so there is little to no time (once disaggregating the benchmark data has been completed) to move back to what may have been missed.
2B) The first two administrations of these benchmarks were given with traditional pen and paper, so it fell to the teacher to chart each response as they graded the assessments. These were 2-day assessments that comprised a total of 168 minutes worth of work. We’re talking about a massive amount of work. This problem was addressed in the third administration by moving to scantron sheets and a test that lasted just one 84 minute class block.

The problems listed above were logistical in nature, and they do not even begin to address the issues I have with standardized testing as a way to measure learning success. Those issues are - well - not really worth getting into, since as everyone who has run my PD this year has told me, “The Common Core is here to stay. Just deal with it and move forward.” (Okay, maybe it wasn’t directly quoted like that, but the first sentence is exactly how it was said in each and every PD I attended regarding Common Core.) Suffice it to say, engaging in these benchmarks, their administrations, and their evaluations is an experience that - in the words of a colleague - “makes me itch.” They just make being a teacher a miserable existence in which students are nothing more than the score they receive on the same test, and their teachers are nothing more than the cummulative improvement of those scores. Turning in my data - my students’ scores - sickened me, and made me feel that all the work I’ve done to enhance the experiences of my students has been in vain.

If education continues down this road, we’re beat. As a society, we’re totally and completely beat. We will lose the individuality we claim to hold dear. We have already decreed that despite the pedagogical importance of differentiating instruction and student choice, what really matters is the students’ ability to perform on something as arbitrary as a standardized test.

I didn’t even sit down to write about this tonight. I was going to write about - well, it doesn’t matter. This is better. Eh, it might be better. It’s definitely different. And I think that’s my point in this rant. We don’t know, as people, where we’re going, but the thing that makes us great is our ability to explore, to search, and to learn. This is about the fight between greater opportunities for our students to find out who they can become and the mindset that believes each and every child is the same and can be assessed in the same way to determine their growth - and by extension - their worth.

But maybe I've got this all wrong.  Maybe the two full weeks of instruction that my students have lost is right on point.  We're about halfway through the school year - 20 weeks or so.  Maybe students should be spending 10% of their schooling with standardized tests.  After all, the Common Core Standards focus on college and workplace readiness, and colleges and workplaces are certainly areas where uniqueness, originality, and individualism are NOT sought-after virtues.

I See Another Fish or The Reflection From Inside the Fishbowl

I had been looking for a way to engage my students in a real conversation about argumentation and appeals. I wanted them to really witness ethos, pathos, and logos being used by their peers. One idea kept coming up in all areas of my PLN - the fishbowl. The variable was how to best implement it.

An approximation of a common planning meeting 1/29/13:

Q1: How do I implement it?
A1: Just have a debate.
Great idea.
Q2: About what? (Devil’s advocate question, as I know the responses are often immediately disengaging.)
A2: Dress Code.
Played out.
A2: Extending the school day.
No way.
A2: Armed guards in school.
Again?
A2: The Superbowl.
(The group giggles.)
A2: Gun control.
Been discussed in every class at this point.
A2: Teen pregnancy.

Q3: Wait - what was that?
A3: Teen pregnancy.
Before that.
A3: Gun control.
Before that.
A3: Armed guards?
After that.
A3: The Superbowl?
That one.

Q4: Why does that make sense?
A4: We can engage kids who don’t want to talk about “school stuff”.
A4: It’s topical, and there is a lot being written about it by people with credibility (ethos).
A4: People care about so much especially if their team is playing (pathos).
A4: There are a ton of statistics to look at (logos).

Q5: What do we do about the kids who don’t like football?
A5: They are the outside of the fishbowl.

Q6: But what do they do?
A6: Analyze the conversation.

Q7: Like decide which side wins.
A7: No. That’s not fun for them. They don’t like football. They have to listen to the conversation for its appeals, not its content per se. They will analyze who brings what appeals to the debate. What examples are there of ethos, pathos, and logos? That way, they are not being asked to listen to a boring conversation about football, but they are being asked to listen to the formation of an argument.

*Friday, Feb 1 (Fishbowl day)

I arranged the desks so that I had 8 in the middle and 14 around the outside. Each of the middle desks had either a 49ers or Raven placard on it. This would determine the point of view of the student in that spot. Each desk also had primary source documents (a packet containing propaganda for the appropriate team, offensive and defensive statistics for both teams, and a copy of the schedules and results of both teams).

As the students in the middle familiarized themselves with the materials, the students on the outside jotted down notes about what they were seeing in the middle.

*note: At this point, I realized that I wished I had gotten the laptop cart to use Today’s Meet to record the backchannel. It would have provided real-time responses to what was happening in the middle. It would have also modeled for some students having trouble grasping the difference between studying the appeals and commenting on the conversations. Twitter would also have worked (@acelini modeled this here).

Once the conversation got going, the group in the middle quickly moved beyond having what they would define as a formal debate. They yelled over one another; they called each other names; they used some foul language. They clearly grasped the pathos.

But overall, an interesting thing happened. They used statistics to prove points. They pointed to the results against similar opponents to prove points. They pulled from their own knowledge base to tie in other facts not included in the documents. They were making appeals using ethos and logos.

The area that pleased me most about this process is that the group on the outside was able to pick up on the appeals that were being used. During the 2nd half of the activity, the inside group was silenced, and the outside group was allowed to report on what they had seen take place. They pointed out the members of the debate who demonstrated the most ethos, and they pulled examples of the logos that had been used. That understanding made the activity feel like a success.

In the future, I will pull in the social media component to keep a running tally of the outer conversation. I feel like that will model the type of commentary we’re looking for, while at the same time, offer ideas and insights to everyone involved. It will make the activity far more collaborative, and as we all know, getting everyone involved generally leads to better performance from the group as a whole.
Used the fishbowl before?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.