Alien Pedagogy

For a long time, I was reluctant to use the think-pair-share method. I thought students would immediately see through it as a way of making them feel comfortable enough to share their ideas.

But as the course goes on, students never do see through it and they do share their ideas.

I have a method of debate that has worked well for me.

There is at least one judge / debate. Ideally there are six students per team and every student has a role (state your team’s argument, rebut the other team’s argument, conclude the case for your team). Each speaker is given two minutes.

The class starts with a resolution, such as “Romeo and Juliet could have prevented their deaths.” From there, the teams are given time to prepare their case and I use this time to train the judges and help them prepare for moderating a debate (ex/ make sure that you know what the person has said. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or to guide the student through introducing their points, citing evidence, and concluding. Be fair, polite, and confident).

The debate ends with a reflection period (What skills are necessary to do well in this activity? How do you feel about your performance in this activity?), which the debaters will reflect upon and share with the group. While this is happening, the judges prepare their comments (one note of achievement and one area for improvement).

Finally, everyone journals something they’ve learned during the activity. This activity tends to produce quality journal entries.

Much depends upon the character and social skills of the judge. The grade the judge has in your class is far less important.

My lesson on exaggeration and farce (in preparation for The Brute) went well.

On the board, I’d written that students were expected to understand concepts “exaggeration” and “farce,” be able to identify ways to tell that an author is writing in a farcical tone, and analyze why we’re attracted to farce.

• We started by distinguishing truth from exaggeration. I told two stories and asked students to vote whether I was truthful for exaggerating. We then shared our own stories in groups.
• We then identified a list of human characteristics (ex/ confused, angry, and beautiful) and from there broke into groups of two. Each group had one person that represented the “true characteristic” and one person that represented the exaggeration. Then they switched roles (The best was tall, in which the shortest girl in the class was “tall” and then the tallest person in the class stood on a chair and looked down at her to represent exaggeration). I asked students to journal their definitions of exaggeration, inviting them to draw whenever possible. They were good notes.
• There was a lot of laughter in our truth vs exaggeration activity, which worked well with my introduction to farce. We identified common jokes that can be found in farce and made connections to popular movies including Scary Movie 4 *.
• From here we worked on ways that one expresses farce in written English by taking a statement made in MSN and then applying techniques of exaggeration. Sadly, there are no emoticons in The Brute, but we otherwise, we produced a solid list that we’ll be able to use while reading the text.
• The class was open at this point and we came up with some theories about why people enjoy farce. Journal.
• Review concepts as a class.

I felt that the lesson was successful, though I feel some guilt that there were few tangible resources in this lesson and in some ways it required very little preparation. However, it included student interaction through speaking, listening, and action. There were cultural references to frame student comprehension. Even my most reluctant readers took notes.

* I have not watched Scary Movie 4, but it was easy to pretend that I had.

This week, the grade 9s started blogging in order to explore their relationship with the text.

There have been some very strong posts, the best of which was a commentary in which the student compared her response to The Little Prince as a 15 year old compared to when she read it as an 11 year old.

Having read the first round of blogs, some students don’t understand the difference between exploring one’s relationship with the text and writing a book report (in this case, a book report is quick summary followed by a “I would recommend this to…” statement).

Briefly, I encourage students to explore their relationship with the text by (not comprehensive):

• Making connections to other texts, their life, “real” life, and “big” ideas.
• Examining why they are drawn to this text, or why they are not. In other words, what can you learn about yourself if you spend your evenings alone reading Emily Dickinson?

To some extent, I’m concerned that the public nature of a blog discourages students from sharing their “real” response. However, I also think that by reading each other’s responses, the class is more likely to comprehend this concept.

The Honors English students are adapting Romeo and Juliet for a 21st century Hong Kong setting.

Amusing ideas so far:

• Instead of the Capulets and Montagues? A 7-11 employee falls in love with a Circle K employee.
• The balcony scene will instead be a couple taking a self-photograph (kind of like this).

They will tell the story photographically. Among other objectives, I hope to use this assignment as a forum to explore the influence of culture on a text as well as to discuss the concept of Shakespeare’s “enduring greatness” if we’re able to do so much with his core conflicts. We’ll return to this assignment when we discuss archetypal characters while reading The Odyssey.

I have also challenged the students to come up with a symbol of fate besides stars. We don’t see those in Hong Kong.