Trial and Error

I am a slacker. Yes, it has been far too long since I last blogged. No, I have no reasonable excuse that would forgive me. Sooo, I have decided to produce somewhat of a highlight reel of the past week instead.

Wednesday 9/28

I felt defeated after class on Monday. I was not going to let Wednesday defeat me too! Since we were discussing Berger today, I decided to also talk about perception, audience, and author's intention. I had the students start the class off by having them quick-write about the following three images that I put up on the projector: the Twilight novel, the Twilight comic, and the Twilight DVD. Twilight, in my opinion, always gets a conversation going. Intentionally, I left the prompt wide open for student interpretation: write about how each of these is seen differently. I gave them 5 minutes to write, then told them to discuss it with the person sitting next to them. Gradually, the classroom was buzzing with conversation. Bingo! I figured out how to get them to talk! I walked around to see what a few of them were chatting about and then opened up the paired conversations into a classroom discussion. As I did, I could hear a silence falling upon them. Nooooooo! Just when I thought that I had figured out how to get them to speak up in class! Wah wah. One by one, the students began to speak up, but I noticed that the only ones who were talking were the ones I had talked to while walking around. My plan to get the students to be more talkative in a group setting was a moderate success. I plan on using a similar premise in other class meetings.



Monday 10/3

Thanks to a few hours in a cat-owner's home on Sunday, my allergies were making me feel like crap on Monday. Although I had a lesson planned, I didn't know how I was going to manage through my fog of sinus congestion and sneezing. I decided to send my students on a scavenger hunt to the library. In 609, Rhodes had us work collaboratively to find books in the library and do other such library-related tasks. The end goal: Getting familiar with the workings of finding things you need using the library's resources. To be certain, I asked the students how many of them had been to the library. Only 3 students raised hands; 2 had only gone there to meet someone. The final task on the scavenger hunt was to find a book written by an author with the student's last name, check it out, and bring it to me in my office. The students said the activity was challenging, but that they were glad I had them do it.

Wednesday 10/5

Since we did not discuss Literacy like I had initially planned on Monday, I had to do double duty today. I wanted to show the students how it feels to be illiterate, so I wrote the quick-write prompt on the whiteboard in IPA. Only one student was able to identify the language, but I told her to keep quiet until further notice. The students were absolutely baffled. I told them to respond to the prompt or to write down how it feels to not know what the prompt says. After 5 minutes of allotted writing time, I gave permission for them to look up the letters and talk to each other to try to get some meaning out of it. After a minute or two, students started shouting out a few words at a time to see if their guesses were right. To my delight, they guessed what everything said! My plot to get them to see how it feels to be illiterate worked, according to my students.

From there, I highlighted the main points in Dale Spender's article, "The Politics of Naming." We made a list of things a person needs in order to become literate and discussed the underlying meanings that are embedded in language. I told them that today's class session was going to be more of a lecture-style delivery rather than a seminar like our past class meetings had been. Oddly enough, the students spoke up more and seemed to be more engaged the whole class session than they had been up to this point in the quarter. Maybe they felt like the pressure was taken off of their shoulders? Their attitude could have changed because I was so passionate about what I was teaching that they became intrigued too. I'm not sure, but all I know is that students came up to me after class saying how they really enjoyed what we were discussing today and that they hoped we did more things like it. Win!