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| Ideas for Next Year's English! |
--Can we have a class facebook page and post about the status of our characters and literature?
--Student will tweet as a character. These can be posted from cell phones directly to their blogs
--Two students can role play characters (such as Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Collins) and start a dialogue, perhaps in class and continuing at home, with one person's blog with comments as the medium. (The other can just post a link to the other blog site.)
--Take the last five minutes of class to brainstorm (on paper or on a laptop) the next blog for that night.
--Use the theme of MASKS: online personas on Facebook, Prufrocks's face to meet the faces that you meet,
--Imagine characters like Liz dealing with the pressure of college and apps
--In-class clicker quizzes on parts of speech, MLA, comma splices, fragments, plagiarism, etc.
--students research colleges they've never heard of and blog about them, with profiles, alumni, etc. find video on youtube about less known colleges: post to blog, maybe share in class.
--more photos of teacher and student on blogs, more stock photos from getty image and google image, and more video blogs (let's make it visual!)
--students interview one another during AP's for exit interviews about the school, academics, constructive criticism, etc.
--Poetry is about time running and time running out (both theme and the reading of a poem). Make this connection and investigate the passage of time in your own lives through both the personal and the poetry
--Literature is the universal in the particular. Use two examples from works we've read to show this.
--All year long, keep a series of running blogs about decision-making. Create your own (thoughtful) categories of styles of decision making. Adjust the categories as you think it through further.
--Consider the following kinds of decision making: emotional, principaled, reasoned, risky vs risk averse, fear-based. Now test and explain each category with examples and analysis: Consider:
1. Your own decision-making process as you decide what classes to take, what colleges to apply to, and (projecting) how you will choose your final college to attend. 2. interview a grandparent (or someone older) about their own decision-making style and process with an important representative anecdote that illustrates it, 3. Elizabeth, Hamlet, Marlow, Gregor, Prufrock, Marvell, Gregor, Meursault, Nick, Winston, Willie/Biff, etc. 4. Create a scene in which any two or more of these characters help you decide which colleges to apply to (or make another important decision in your life).
--Keep your theory running all year long on your blog, culminating in a research paper.
--Also, keep track of identity formation (with some readings from Psychology and Freud) and how these characters define themselves.
--high school knowledge vs. college knowledge: which is factual, disputed, theoretical, informed conversational, scholarly? Keep this blog theme all year long. Find examples of college essays vs. high school essays.
MORE IDEAS:
-experience non-clock time and write about it
-more pictures on blogs
-One powerpoint slide every day for a report on authors, time periods, genres, lit terms, etc. Rotates around class so every 15 days, student does another one. Can email it AND post it to site
-Possible blog topic: choose one fine art picture and pair it with a poem. Each student does a blog like this every quarter on a rotating basis.
-Confinement as a theme.
-Challenge yourself somehow every semester. What's outside your comfort zone that you want to push yourself to do. Then blog about it.
-Use statistical data in at least one essay! Required. You may generate the data from counting words or a survey, etc.
-Create a book from photos with text. on Blurb.com one for you, one for the school. About literature, with photos, your best writing, about you!
Even more ideas:
-habituation, readings, a theme for the Bennets, seniors, Gregor Samsa. Have a theory about it.
- Face to meet the faces that you meet.
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