Alien Pedagogy

When I try to get my students beginning to think critically about big ideas, I like to invite them to consider human nature.

I think it’s an important concept for understanding what we’re doing in English, and it allows me to talk about Pearl Jam.

(We could also discuss irony since for all of our “evolution,” Vedder and co. remind us of how little we’ve done. How contrary to expectations!)

Circle of Connections takes different aspects of your text and put them in a list. From there, students will draw a  circle of circles and then place each word in a circle, connecting them together with their thoughts. This activity was not effective when I started with nine circles, but what I did this week was more effective.

I started the class discussing “random” (the slang usage). We shared some “that was so random” moments (my random moment was the ending of Ong-Bak 2). From there we made a list of random words and then tried to explain how Romeo, fate, or tragedy could be connected to a watermelon, a computer, and “WHAT?”

The challenge: We made a list of Romeo and Juliet ideas, characters, and quotes. I drew three circles on the white board and asked if anyone could come up with three words that I couldn’t link together, which hooked the class while modeling how the activity is done.

The students then took up the challenge with three circles, then five, and finally nine.

I used this activity to help students collate and consolidate our ground work on Romeo and Juliet before moving on to essays, projects, and tests.

I was taught this activity back in university. Some readers may know it by another name, though Juliet would be quick to remind us that the activity’s more important than the name.

Today, my grade 9 students became psychologists in order to study The Joker.

There are tons of JPEGs of the Joker online — most of them high quality — so I was able to create a Power Point presentation in a few minutes. No gimmicks. No sound bytes. Just images, quotation, and student discussion.

And the Joker has a series of excellent lines that lead us to his motivation.

In this way, we consolidated our understanding of direct and indirect characterization and moved on to expressing our analysis of characterization in writing.