Wondering about the first year

I’ve thought quite a bit about what teaching is going to be like as a first-year teacher, finally freed from the proverbial shackles – okay, that’s a little bit hyperbolic – of another teacher’s strictures and style. (Of course, the flip side of that is that the teachers you work with generally have worked to get those sorts of things lined out and know to a degree what does and doesn’t work.)

I want to invite more seasoned teachers to comment on their own first-year experiences, but let me hypothesize for a moment about what I think I need to keep at the forefront of my preparation for this year.

 

Open question: Self-censorship in the classroom

Here’s another open question for educators of any sort, but especially those who specialize in English language arts and/or library science, as well as administrators (if I have any readers who are admins):

I set up my classroom library a few weeks ago – which, unfortunately, looks so meager compared to the shelf I have for books – with a number of my own personal books (and a few that were left in the classroom from previous teachers), except for one book of mine: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. When I got this book used from the university bookstore for a class I took on adolescent lit, it already had a section of about 30 pages – and the first 30 pages or so, to boot – that had come unglued from the binding and fell out. I still have the section with the rest of the bound book, but it obviously needs repair. (Fortunately, I have an old friend who just got her masters in library science, and I know that she can help with rebinding.)

I was also talking with my wife about the possibility of having my seniors read a novel, except that I don’t have any class sets of a “world lit” book (other than a couple of canonical British novels, but I would like a little more diversity than that). I mentioned that I’ve heard great things about Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (as well as A Thousand Splendid Suns) but that there was some controversy about the fact that it depicts a boy being raped. A discussion then ensued about being careful about content, and I remarked that Perks has a rape scene in it as well and covers some mature topics.

So the question I’m asking is this: How far should a teacher, especially a new teacher without tenure, go to limit the availability of books in their own classroom library? (I’m not even raising the question of required material at this point, just what students could have access to in the classroom either for personal reading or for reading assignments where students can choose what they read.) I’m of the mind that all material should be age-appropriate – and for that reason, I decided to leave David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day and Chuck Palahnuik’s Stranger Than Fiction at home for material that is too mature for high schoolers – but I think that students should have some freedom to read about things they’re interested in. I even think that parents should probably have the right to limit their children’s access to certain things if they have some sort of moral/religious conviction against it. (Note that I don’t find that prohibiting students from doing something, especially reading some certain type of literature, is productive at all – in fact, it will probably just make them want to read it more.)

I know of at least a handful of books in my classroom library that would fit this: Perks, John Green’s Looking for Alaska and possibly even his An Abundance of Katherines (there is a very small amount of sexual conduct involved, although it’s never graphic), and Aidan Chambers’ Postcards from No Man’s Land (which has several gay characters and a moment of confused transgenderism). The thing is, though, that I don’t want to get rid of any of these books – none of them are inappropriate for high school students (and in fact, all are intended for high school students and feature high school age characters). They are all great books (although I confess I’m not a huge fan of Perks – I find it tedious at points) that I think students would enjoy and be interested by. And even some of the classics like The Catcher in the Rye end up being challenged – where do you draw the line? Sexual references? (As if high schoolers don’t get that.) Drugs? Alcohol? (Yeah, high schoolers never know anyone who does drugs or abuses alcohol.) GLBT issues? (Or do we want to emulate Iran and simply not acknowledge our GLBT students’ existence?)

I’m pretty conflicted. Please, my faithful readers, leave me comments and let me know your thoughts.

 

Rounding the corner?

In preparation for Independence Day events (and being a musician, I’m well-occupied with performing), someone remarked to me that the Fourth marks the halfway point of summer. I think this is about right: I have only about 5 more weeks of work before I have my open week to make final preparations for the beginning of the school year on August 17th. That’s only six weeks to get the rest of my curriculum planned and to get my organizational stuff in order.

It’s a little scary.

I am almost done with my sophomore lit selections from the textbook, although I keep thinking about what skills would be useful to help 10th graders with so that they don’t have to be crammed so much into the last two years of high school, things like critical reading and thinking skills. I also discovered that I probably didn’t have enough literature from the initial units I picked, so I’m going through and adding some more, including a unit on “genre fiction” that will allow us to compare literature from a variety of genres. The first selection is a short story called “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury – an excellent start.

As for the novels, I think I’ve got my selection nailed down to these works:

• Farewell to Arms
• Of Mice and Men
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Crucible [Edit: Actually, this  is taught in junior English now]
• Animal Farm
• 1984
• The Scarlet Letter
• The Great Gatsby
• A Separate Peace

1984 is still iffy – I haven’t asked for a class set yet. (I don’t want to seem greedy!) Nevertheless, I’m going to try and work it out.

Edit: I notice that most of these works are American lit, with the exception of the Orwell novels, most are twentieth century, with the exception of the Hawthorne novel, and all of them are written by male authors. I hate to say it, but I’m probably going to end up teaching Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights out of the necessity of another non-American, non-20th century, non-male novel. I know that there are others I could probably choose – and would prefer – but I have class sets of both novels currently. At least I can limit my chick lit selections to one novel. Further edit: OR – I could try to get Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! That would be a brilliant and far preferable selection – it would be pre-20th century British novel by a female author, and it fits somewhat into the science fiction genre while still covering issues of humanity and the idea of anxiety toward science. If I can, I think I’ll try to get a class set of this one instead and possibly teach it right before Of Mice and Men, which to me resonates along the same lines (humanity, longing for acceptance).

I still have the semester-long writing elective and my senior English to determine, although I have a good idea about what I’ll do for both classes: memoirs, profiles, some form of professional writing (cover letter, resume, etc.), reflective writing, possibly a creative piece that incorporates research (following an EJ article by Linda Hammond on this subject), and of course some more conventional forms like essays, possibly including a college application essay, for the writing elective; an autoethnography project and probably some cultural projects for senior English, as well as a college application essay, a persuasive essay, and a major research paper (I will probably include a literary analysis essay in here, depending on what I decide when I get to know this senior English class better).

Maybe I’m halfway done, but I doubt I’m nearly half-ready. We’ll see.

Farewell to Arms

Of Mice and Men

The Grapes of Wrath

The Crucible

Animal Farm

1984

The Scarlet Letter

The Great Gatsby

A Separate Peace

 

Review: Things Your Grammar Never Told You

I promised a review of a little grammar text I recently finished, Things Your Grammar Never Told You, and since I’m a man of my words, here goes.

 

Student teaching advice, Part 1: Creating materials

Looking at my blog stats (which I confess I’m a bit obsessive about), I notice that many of my posts with the most traffic have been ones about student teaching. So, in an attempt to write about things that I know something about (and to keep things going through this somewhat dry phase of planning-but-not-yet-teaching), I’m planning on writing a series of entries with advice for upcoming student teachers to consider before they start this invaluable (but stressful) experience.

First up is a topic I feel very strongly about: preparing materials for classroom use.

 

Poetic spam?

I just got perhaps the strangest spam message I have ever received (well, at least the strangest since the IRS phishing message that prompted me to click a link to tehran.ir). It is strange because it has an element that I have never before seen in the strange messages that often pop up in my inbox (or more commonly, in the university mail service’s spam filter): poetry.

 

There’s one down…

I have, to the best of my knowledge, selected the works for my junior English course. I think that the units will account for about 18-24 weeks of instruction just on literature, with some other speech, writing, and (possibly?) research units thrown in to round things out. I’m also leaving some space for added literature to be covered at the end of the year, giving myself some buffer room in case the units I have selected go long (which is not out of the question).

Still working on my novel selection for my semester-long elective course. I really want to teach 1984 since 1) I already have a class set of Animal Farm that I plan to teach, 2) teaching two Orwell novels would be a great way to demonstrate his style, and 3) I’ve already taught 1984 and have plenty of materials and a final project assignment ready to go. We don’t have a class set of 1984, so I’d have to try and obtain it, which might be tricky since I don’t know how readily funds for new books will come. There’s a possibility, though, that I might have until next semester to get them since (as far as I know – which isn’t as much as I should, sadly) the novels course is taught 2nd semester. I hope.

Also just finished The Crucible and The Great Gatsby (since I’m a horrible literature aficionado for not having read them before), both of which I enjoyed immensely. Next on deck as far as canonical novels that I will probably teach for this novels elective: Farewell to Arms (oh, Hemingway, how I adore thee: let me count the ways…) and A Separate Peace, which I hope is decent.

Additionally, I would really like to teach a YA novel for this elective course, but I don’t know if I’m pushing my luck even trying to get 1984, and I definitely put a higher priority on that than a YA novel especially since I don’t know which one I would teach. The Catcher in the Rye (is that even properly a YA book since it’s in the canon?), Whirligig by Paul Fleischman, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (ooh, a graphic novel, how scandalous for a novels course!) are all books that I’ve considered that wouldn’t really be contentious (okay, Catcher might be a little contentious) and that I could possibly ask for a class set of one of them. I don’t know yet. (Leave comments with advice, si vous plait.)

I’m working on my sophomore lit selections now. I have a feeling that I will probably do fewer works of literature with the sophomores and maybe incorporate more research, critical reading, and writing activities to try and get those skills honed before they become juniors and start freaking out about ACTs.

Still left: senior English (yay for more writing and world lit) and the writing elective. Teaching creative writing is quite possibly going to be the strangest part for me to get figured out.

Can you (my ever-observant reader) tell that I’m starting to get a little panicked? (Critical reading exercise: Note three elements of this blog entry that indicate fear and mental breakdown. ) The school year is drawing nigh, and I don’t feel as confident as I should. Starting to finish up the junior course leaves me hopeful, but not as much as I’d like. (I will accept encouraging comments below as well.)

 

Decimating ignorance, or, When smart people make wrongheaded mistakes

Just a few days back, I finished perusing the little grammar book Things Your Grammar Never Told You. It’s an interesting book, and I’ll get around to posting more about its strengths (and of course, its weaknesses), but I have a small qualm for the time being.

On page 54, Scharton and Neulieb talk about usage and shifts in meaning, specifically mentioning the word decimate:

Sometimes confusion about a word’s denotation occurs when people use the word in a more general sense than its original meaning warrants. Generalized use can stretch a word’s meaning until it sags like an old sweatshirt, comfortably covering more and more, revealing less and less, and doing its job in a particularly unattractive way. [...] As far as some political writers are concerned, the verb decimate means “to reduce drastically.” Decimate, which is related to the word decimal, means “to eliminate one in ten.”

Later, in a glossary of usage, there is an entry for decimate, annihilate:

Note that the Latin root, deci-, is the same as in decimal, a system of numbers based on ten. Decimate means to “reduce by ten percent”; it refers to the bloody practice of slaughtering one captured soldier in ten. That’s bad but not as bad as annihilating, that is, wiping out everyone.

I was, to say the least, disappointed at seeing this.

The truth, of course, is that decimate does not merely mean “to take one out of ten,” and it very frequently means “to reduce dramatically.” Moreover, this error is an example of a fallacious appeal to etymology, and linguist Ben Zimmer  gives very convincing evidence about why it should not be defined as such:

Saying that the “real meaning” of decimate is ‘reduce by one-tenth’ aptly illustrates the “etymological fallacy” — the notion that we have to go back to the usage of a bygone era, and perhaps even a different language, to divine the “true” sense of a word. Decimate entered English around 1600, with reference to the Roman army practice. Around 1650, the Earl of Essex tried to revive Roman “decimation” to keep the peace in Ireland, but subsequent use of the word decimate in the “one-tenth” sense invariably referred back to the Roman era. And by 1663 the usage of decimate had already expanded to mean “to destroy or remove a large proportion of,” according to citations collected in the Oxford English Dictionary.

For nearly three and a half centuries, then, virtually every use of the word decimate has been in this extended sense, except when referring to the harsh old Roman practice. And these days such references seem limited to complaints about the word itself.

This error, in my opinion, is indicative of a deeper problem that seems to be entrenched in most grammar texts. Yes, grammar is about rules, tendencies, and to a degree conformity to the standards that your readers  will expect you to have, but it is not about proscriptions and dictums handed down from on high. While I think this text does better than some others (like the highly overrated Elements of Style), its propensity to spout the same old grammatical canards is disheartening. If someone can show me a grammar text that doesn’t do this sort of thing, I would be delighted.

 

An open letter to textbook publishers

Dear Literature Textbook Publishing Companies,

As an educator, I must thank you for doing teachers (and to a lesser extent, students) the service of compiling a great deal of literature (especially in a variety of genres), biographical and historical information, and other useful features that help facilitate the teaching of literature in the English language arts classroom. All of the work you do to give a wide selection of works saves me a lot of work in trying to track down the works that I would like to teach as well as in photocopying them for distribution, etc. I do really appreciate the fact that you provide this service, and it has been incredibly useful in my own curriculum planning since you include literature that I often haven’t even read.

However, I must make a complaint. It has become apparent to me that you are not always very careful in looking over versions of the textbooks that you send out. In particular, the teacher edition that I have is replete with omissions and errors, and not insignificant ones, either: the ending of a story might be missing, or the ending line of a poem might only have the first word, or one page might end in the middle of a paragraph and the following page repeat back at the beginning of the same paragraph.

In all fairness, I have not yet checked to see if my employer has any other teacher editions that do not have these errors, nor have I had the opportunity to check the student texts to see if they are error-ridden either.  Nevertheless, it makes my job much more difficult when I cannot even read some whole works without being cut off (unless, of course, they happen to be available on the Internet, as some poems are).

Some of these errors are surprising, so do try to be more careful in the future.

Sincerely,
Mr. B

---

[Maybe at some point I'll take some pictures of what I'm talking about for those interested. It's really irritating to be reading a story, turn the page, and see that there's no more story - well, there is, but it didn't get printed. If any of my student texts or any of my other teacher editions (hopefully I have another teacher edition of this American lit text other than the one that I discovered these in) have errors like these, I will raise some hell, proverbially speaking. I'll let you, my faithful readers, know how things turn out.]

[Update, 6/27/09: I finally got back to my classroom again today, and I was greeted (so to speak) with good and bad news: Good) The student editions didn't seem to have the errors that my teacher edition did (and I haven't found any errors in the sophomore text - haven't gotten to the senior text), but Bad) There were no other teacher editions there. So I may need to talk to my principal anyway about complaining to the publisher so we can get a teacher edition sans errata.]

 

Current reading: Two little grammar texts

As part of my summer reading (which is a sizable list: the majority of 3 literature textbooks, at least 3 canonical novels, and some other smaller works purely for enjoyment), I am taking a look at two grammar texts that I happened upon in my new classroom, obviously left from previous teachers (either the most recent one or the veteran who retired the year before). One should be familiar to many: William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. I can’t say I’m surprised to see this one, honestly, given how revered it is in so many circles.

The other is Things Your Grammar Never Told You (there’s a picture of an old woman on the cover, supposedly a grandmother figure – get it, grammar, gramma? …yeah) by Maurice Scharton and Janice Neulieb. The latter is a figure familiar to me: she is a professor at nearby Illinois State University, the executive secretary of IATE, and the editor of the Illinois English Bulletin. (At least one of my regular readers should be familiar with her as well.)

I’m about 50+ pages into the latter – I’m saving up my energy for Elements after hearing both the highest praise and serious criticism of it – and while it has a lot of redeeming qualities (computer tips, for instance, which are interspersed throughout the chapters), I have my reservations about many of the things it says. A full review will of course be in order once I finish it. (Whether or not I say anything much about Elements depends on how much of my comments will be any different than what more knowledgeable people like Geoff Pullum have already said.)