Flying Solo

I'm on day two of my first week completely solo will all five classes. Yesterday wasn't so bad, though. Due to a small error in timing, I'm finishing up some of my CT's units rather than starting my own mini-units with the classes. Right now, I'm finishing Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns with the World Lit class, finishing Hamlet with the morning section of British Lit, starting "North by Northwest" with the Film Studies group, introducing alphabet books to the Children's Lit students, and ending my unit on Much Ado About Nothing with my section of British Lit.

I'm finding that the two classes which are the hardest to teach are World Lit and Film Studies. The World Lit class, I think, may be too "advanced" in maturity for some of these students, particularly the boys. A Thousand Splendid Suns is an incredibly well-written book, but it also deals with very serious issues like spousal abuse, war, and religious rights. The girls all seem to get that these are serious things--perhaps because in the book, it is the female characters who bear the brunt of the abuse and heartache which is perpetrated by the male characters and a male-dominated society. The boys in this class, though, don't seem to get it. Sure, a few do, but there is a group of boys (athletes, specifically) who manage to crack jokes and laugh during class. I've yet to figure out what's funny about women being forced to stay at home and be servants to their abusive husbands.

The Film Studies class is hard for a different reason. This class is full of students who just seem to not care about school--they see Film as an "easy A" their senior year. They goof off on their work, they talk and joke incessantly--even during tests! Several students refuse to give up their cell phones during tests, to the point where they lie and say "I don't have one." Well, they definitely have one when I end up taking it five minutes later because I caught them using it to text their friends during the test. One student is so attached to his phone that he will actually argue with you about why he is special and shouldn't have to give it up. I remember a time when I actually got him to give up the phone (with my CT's help) and he unplugged his headphones, turned the phone off, carefully closed all the flaps on his ultra-heavy-duty Otterbox and told us that if there was "one scratch" on the phone, he would make his parents sue (can you say "spoiled brat"?). Then, he proceeded to throw the phone into the box! After going on and on about how he didn't want it broken and we should take care of it, he goes and throws it rather than placing it gently.

Then, also in Film, there's a pair of boys who will not shut up. I swear, I could give them a test and tell them to take it, but if they were the only two in the room, they'd take a zero on it because they wouldn't get any work done. One of them can't make up his mind on what his name is and comes in with a different one every day--and he won't answer to anything but is nom du jour. He also thinks he's some kind of hot-shot like a cross between Jonah Hill and that kid that plays McLovin'. Except he doesn't realize that he's just obnoxious.

I suppose I'll have to get used to students like them because with the way kids are being raised now, I don't think that mentality is going to change. There's just no respect any more. There's no sense of where the line is between being funny and being absolutely annoying. I think that part of the problem is also that they know I'm an intern, not a fully-paid and licensed teacher so they push the boundaries and think they can get away with all sorts of things they wouldn't be able to get away with if my CT was teaching. So far, they think they've gotten away with it. But I get revenge in the worst way: I assign essays.

A New Quarter, A Fresh Start... Yeah, Right!

I don't know what happened between the end of Quarter One and the start of Quarter Two, but my classroom just hasn't been the same. I went from having 7 average-and-above achieving students and 1 I-know-he's-smarter-than-he-lets-on-but-he-just-won't-do-the-work student to having 3 average-and-above students and 5 failing-because-they-won't-do-the-work students.

I honestly have no idea what happened. The students themselves have told me the work isn't that hard. For example, this quarter, they're writing an 8-10 page research paper. They have the entire quarter before Winter Break to write this paper. At the same time, they're reading Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" since we're in the Renaissance time-wise. They usually read a couple scenes over a three-night period (and these are short scenes. Some of them are only a little over a page or a page and a half long) and then come in and act out those scenes. That's the extent of what I'm pushing them to do with Shakespeare right now. Read and then come in and act it out.

While they do that, they've also got their paper to think about. So far, they've had to come up with a topic (they all did), find me 10 sources that they will use to get information about that topic with at least 3 of those 10 being book sources (they've all done this, though two students took two extra weeks and multiple prompts from me to do it), write an annotated bibliography (basically write me a paragraph for each source and tell me how you're going to use it in your paper) (three students did this and I gave them two weeks [that's less than one paragraph a day]), and finally write me 20 note cards (each card being the equivalent of: 3 bullet points or one long quote from the source) (three [the same three students] did this [and I've told them multiple times that they should be constantly taking notes and that they should have started taking notes on day 1 of the project]).

Is that too much to ask of them? The three students who turned in the work have all said they don't know what the fuss is about because it honestly was pretty easy to do. When I asked the other students why they hadn't done it, I got blank stares and shrugs.

Right now, my class average is a 64%. I repeat: my class average score is a failing grade.

This is completely unacceptable. I just wish I knew how I could get the kids who aren't doing the work to realize they need to be doing it. Hopefully the fact that their grades are now all completely entered into the online gradebook, their parents will see that they're failing and do something about it. I'm at a loss.

Cultural Insensitivity

I am honestly appalled by the amount of cultural insensitivity that I see as I watch various classes as part of my internship. This is especially present in the World Literature class which my CT teaches. Specifically, there is a pair of boys who seem to take every opportunity to mock the cultures and people they're reading about. While watching a video about the horrible treatment of widows in India, these boys danced in their seats in a caricature of what they think a Hindu dance would be. The did the same while watching a video about how some families in India kill their children if they're girls because of how expensive girls are to raise in their society (this is due to the dowry they pay the husband's family at marriage even though the practice has been outlawed).

It astounded me that these two boys would be in the classroom, laughing and dancing as such horrific practices were explained to the class.

I see the appropriation of culture every day, it seems. The Native American dreamcatcher has become some great symbol of the hipsters. I've seen girls with tattoos of dreamcatchers who couldn't even explain to me what it was. I see bands using battle headdresses on clothing as part of their merchandise lines. It seems that there is very little awareness of the difference between appropriating somebody else's culture and being respectful of it.

What's even sadder is that most of the perpetrators I see are people who could be labeled as "privileged white upper-middle class." These are the same students who think violence is cool and who can't keep their hands off their phones for more than five minutes. One student even outright admitted that she gets anxious if separated from her phone. I'm going to stop here because I could write whole novels on the problem of cell phones in school.

But for now, I just want to remind people that just because you think something is funny because it's not your culture and you're not used to seeing it as normal, doesn't give you the right to mock it.

Culture These Days...

My students had to turn in their final papers for the quarter last night by midnight. I received papers from all but two of my students, but surprisingly I got a paper from the one student who consistently fails to hand in his work. It was a very nice surprise to wake up and have an e-mail from him in my inbox with an assignment attached. We'll ignore the fact that the e-mail looked like this:

I don't know what exactly it is about the "yolo" craze, but it bothers me like almost nothing else. Oh, well. At least I got a paper out of him. The two who failed to hand in work will get stern talking to's when I see them again on Friday.

Time, Time, Time

These last few weeks have been so hectic. I taught the King Arthur unit in my CT's other section of British Lit (the section I don't normally teach) so I was teaching two classes instead of just one, which was a system shocker. That, plus the additional hecticness of Junior standardized testing which has rearranged the entire schedule of classes for the high school has just led to me being a discombobulated mess.

The King Arthur unit went pretty well with the other class. I was slightly disappointed to find so many kids not willing to turn in their work, though. I only usually have one or two (though granted, that's about 1/4 of my class) who fight me when it comes to turning in work. But over half of this other class didn't turn in their paper assignment. I was also a bit put out when, during our debate on media accuracy in portrayal of the Arthurian Legend, most students didn't want to participate. In addition, they struggled much more than my students did in the debate.

I have 8 College Prep level students in the class I teach. In a class of 22 (11 Honors, 11 CP) students, they were unable to come up with the same caliber of argumentative evidence and work as my 8 CP kids. I was very disappointed (especially in the Honors students).

As for what this week holds, I'll be continuing to work with my CP students on their Medieval Romance argumentative compare/contrast essays. I'll also be popping in to guest-teach a class on Alice in Wonderland with my CT's Children's Literature class today. I'm really excited for that because anybody who knows me would be able to easily say that Alice in Wonderland is my favorite story of all-time.

No manner of luck at all...

You know how sometimes you have a week where absolutely nothing seems to be going your way? I'm going on a month of that feeling.

My mom passed away in late August and everything seemed to be going alright immediately after that. I took a day off from my internship before discovering that I was going to go stir crazy if I just sat in my room letting myself be sad the entire time. So I went back to interning and the first week was fine.

Then I started getting sick. At first it was bronchitis. Then it was some sort of cold that manifested into congestion so bad that I couldn't hear because my head was so stuffed up.

Just as I was getting over the sick part, I ended up in the hospital emergency room with extreme stomach pain caused by my accidentally aggravating an ulcer by eating spicy food. I was in enough pain that I thought the problem was my appendix. Turns out, I'm just too stressed. Quelle surprise.

And because that wasn't enough, my boyfriend broke up with me. That I'm getting over rather well thanks to the sagely words of Miranda Lambert. I have simply fixed my make up and moved on.

But just because the universe can't leave well enough alone, I was just informed (late yesterday evening) that I have to re-take a course that is required for my teaching certification because I had to pass with a B- or better. I'd like you to note that my professor gave me a C+. On top of that course, I was told this morning that I must also retake ANOTHER course where my final grade was not satisfactory for certification. Of course, nobody at UNH bothered to mention this requirement to me while I was an undergraduate.

Ah, well. C'est la vie, non?

As far as my class is concerned, things are going well. We've finished with King Arthur (but boy, I could spend AGES on that topic) and are moving on to The Canterbury Tales. I'm mixing up this unit in that I'll also be providing essay-writing instruction because they've finally been assigned an actual essay to write. I plan on modeling Penny Kittle's conference techniques because, having seen those in the past, I think that with the group I've got (two very high performing students, two low performing students, and four average students) this method would be the most beneficial.

I gave them a handout on MLA style and one with advice on how to make an essay truly readable. I got both from the UNH Connors Writing Center for free off their website. Definitely an awesome resource for any teacher who may be trying to teach the dreaded formal essay to their students. I've got rough drafts from most of them right now that I'm going to look over and see what I can use to teach a few mini-lessons on grammar and style. Today, I'll be putting all of the drafts up on the projector screen (with names missing, of course) to do a group conference and critique.

Now, that critique shouldn't take our entire class period (today is an odd block day so the kids have all their odd period classes for 100 minutes instead of the standard 50 and tomorrow they'll have only their even period classes). Toward the end of the class, I'm going to introduce them to The Canterbury Tales via "The Prologue" and give them each their assigned character. Each student will have one character from the tales and, in addition to the class readings of "The Prologue" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale", will have to read their character's tale. After they've done this, they'll do a short project (it should only take a couple of days) where they'll create a "Fakebook" profile of the character they've been assigned using information they've gathered through the readings.

I'm slightly worried about assigning the essay (a long-term project) and the profile (much shorter term) at the same time, but I think they can handle it.

PM

Here's a few of my favorite students...

I've met quite a few students who are... well... interesting. Nearly all of them just serve to make me smile and liven up a class that might otherwise struggle to be interesting. I've changed the names of students because I obviously can't tell you who they actually are.

Anna-Maria. She's the ultimate Celebrity Buzz/Gawker/TMZ/Perez-style girl. The class she's in is writing Anglo-Saxon boasts using a celebrity (or a teacher) as a subject. She's writing from Kanye West's perspective and her effort is turning out to be rather hilarious, if a bit tacky. In a discussion today about death, she announced that she wanted to be buried with all of her money--actual physical bills and coins--like a "true G". She wants her family and friends to cry at the "pure swag" she'll be a display of in her casket. Particularly, she wants to be holding a bouquet made of $20. And, to top it all off, she wants her kids to dig her up after she's been buried in order to claim their inheritance.

Marilyn. She dresses like a pop-goth 1950s pin-up and wants to be a housewife. Tattoos, piercings, and a love of children's stories. She's a character and she makes every class interesting.

Seth. He reminds me a little bit of a wanna-be Jonah Hill/Michael Cera combo. He tries too hard to get the girls to like him and to get the boys to think he's an OK guy. He's constantly inviting the kids in his class to movie parties complete with "bacon tacos". I don't know if these are actually tacos with bacon on them or if it's something else entirely, but the rest of the class seems to love them. He had to have his picture taken the other day for the vo-tech school IDs and came into his class back here at the regular school wearing nothing but his jeans, shoes, a red vest, and a polka-dot bow tie. One of the girls he's always trying to impress asked him what prompted the outfit and he explained that it was for the picture he had to take. She asked him why he chose the outfit he did and his answer was--direct quote--"because literally yolo".

Liz. She's in the same class as Seth and she LOVES Charlie Chaplin. She's a pretty big film enthusiast and she's always popping into the conversation to offer a comment on the films they're discussing in class. She doesn't do much that's really out of the ordinary, but her enthusiasm for movies reminds me so much of a good friend I had in high school who is studying film production in college now. They've even got similar hair cuts.

I've got two kids in my class that always make me smile when they start talking with each other. Thomas and Tom. An anglophile and a jock. They should have nothing in common, but they have some great conversations and debates in class. Not always on topic, but they're amusing and tangentially related to what they're supposed to be talking about. The class wouldn't be the same without one or the other.

In other news, the sun just came out. I haven't seen it in a couple of days so this is really nice. I had to wade through the street to get from my boyfriend's dorm to my own last night.

Struggle

I got my first call from a parent the other day. I didn't take the call, my CT did because I haven't given my number out to students. Here's the background:

I was not in school on Monday because I was fighting off the worst day of my Crud (which appears to be some form of bronchitis) and to get by I pretty much had to put myself in a cough syrup coma or I'm pretty sure I would have started coughing up blood. My CT filled in for me in class. Monday afternoon was when the call came in. The parent said the student described me as rude and abrupt and that the student was confused about some of my grading policies.

Now, as my CT explained it to me, "rude and abrupt" probably means I'm just moving through the material too fast and I should slow it down. And she's right. I did Beowulf in two weeks. Which for college prep-level kids is a bit too fast. I should have taken three, maybe four. But I can't take it back now. I can only learn from my mistake and do it differently in the future. Which I did immediately. I re-did my lesson plan for yesterday's class throughout the day and made it more of a review of the text and discussion instead of reading the next Arthur story like I had planned. And from the looks of it, it went well. I'm hoping that these changes (which I will continue to make to my existing lessons) solve the problems this student is facing.

I also really hope that my CT is right and that "rude and abrupt" means I'm moving too fast and not that this student thinks I'm rude to the class. I don't think I am, but I will admit that I am a bit more informal as a teacher than many of the teachers they're probably used to having. The vernacular that we traditionally teach kids with is so far from the vernacular they use in every day life that sometimes they have difficulty understanding it. So I tend to try and break things down into a more understandable phrasing for the students. Maybe my candor could be perceived as rude? I'm not sure.

As for today, I'm doing what could be the most fun lesson I have planned for the entire Anglo-Saxon unit. We've read three of the Arthurian stories--"How Arthur Got His Sword", "The Death of Arthur", and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"--and now we're going to watch some pop culture adaptations of these legends: pieces of Disney's "The Sword in the Stone" and Monty Python's "The Holy Grail" and then the entirety of the first episode of the BBC's "Merlin". The students are going to be comparing and contrasting what they observe about the characters, relationships, settings, and themes in the pop culture adaptations to what they've read in Sir Thomas Mallory's texts.

At the same time, they're learning about the Medieval Romance as a genre which will lead into their first paper: analyzing the three pieces we've read in the early canon of BritLit using the Medieval Romance traits. Students will have to make an argument for either Beowulf, the Arthurian Legends, or "The Wife of Bath's Tale" (which we haven't gotten to yet).

Oh, and we need to work on our vocabulary.

Back to School Crud

If you've ever known anybody who attended any sort of convention, you've probably heard about ConCrud. Well, I've found something that's worse: Back-to-School Crud. I started not feeling well on Tuesday or Wednesday. Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time coughing. Today it's coughing and nausea. Whatever I've got is some sort of mixture of the common cold and a minor flu. I didn't have a class to teach yesterday which was probably a good thing since I probably would have coughed my way through it and been completely incomprehensible. Today will be my first experience teaching while under the weather.

I can see the Crud in the students, too. There's a few walking around with those little packets of tissues and some with bags of cough drops at the ready. I'm seeing more travel size bottles of hand sanitizer than ever before as kids desperately try to keep the germs away. I think I'm getting it twice as bad because I moved back into University housing so my Crud is a mixture of high school Crud and dorm Crud. I have rarely looked forward to a weekend more than these past two weeks.

Teaching just wipes you out. There's a tremendous amount of strain put on teachers (and students!) when it comes to meeting educational responsibilities and that's definitely a part of why the Crud comes back year after year. Most high school teachers are up before the sun (my alarm goes off at 5:30 which is later than most of the other teachers here) in order to get to school before the students so they can be available for before-school meetings, conferences, etc; Then there's the 7-hour school day. And the time where teachers have to stay after school so that they can be available for after-school meetings, conferences, etc; By the time a teacher gets home at night, they've pretty much got the energy to eat a small dinner and then go to bed. Forget the gym. Forget relaxing with a TV show or two. That's out of the question if you want a full night's sleep. Don't forget--many teachers grade at home. So instead of cracking open a book to unwind, they're still mentally in a school environment.

Being a student is trying, too. But there's a higher stress level involved with teachers. We don't get to hang out with our friends all the time because we're confined to one room with a rotating set of pupils. We can't just go next door and chill with Ms. Smith on our off-periods because we've got to make sure we're prepared for the next class. And high stress jobs mean the worker is more likely to get sick.

Teaching is hugely rewarding. Once you get past the Crud.

PM

Heat Index

I don't know what it is about schools, but it seems that none of them can get the whole "temperature regulation" thing down. Yesterday, it was comfortably warm in my classroom and today as I sit here to write this all I can think is "man, I can't wait until I get back to UNH and can curl up in a blanket and make my boyfriend thaw my feet out". Tomorrow, according to my CT, could easily be a sauna. The problem being that the intern building temperature does not change in relation to the external temperature. So today was a bit chilly, overcast, and glum (there's a bit of sun now, though) and the building couldn't warm up naturally. Yet, the air conditioning unit right next to my desk is still dumping out cold air. It seems to me that it would be simple enough to design a system where the thermostat for the building was reliant on not only an internal thermometer, but an external one as well. That way, the heat wouldn't still be on when it was 80 degrees and the air conditioner would stay off on chiller days. UNH has this same problem, but that's mostly because their buildings are pretty darn old and can't go from no heat to heat to back again as quickly as a more modern system.

On that note, only 6 more hours until I can go be truly warm again.

The Plague of the Helicopter Parent

One of the biggest obstacles that educators face in today's world is the Helicopter Parent (HP). You know exactly what I'm talking about: the parent(s) who just cannot let their child have any individual experience or make their own choices We've all known an HP (or the child of one) at one point or another in our own educational journeys. It may seem like HPs are just doing what they think is right to make sure that their child has the best they can get as they grow up, but HPs are actually extremely detrimental to their children's ability to act and think independently AND they create massive headaches for the teachers, coaches, and bosses of their children.

Take, for example, the 53 year old mom who posed as her middle-school-aged daughter in order to take a test for her. What is that teaching the daughter? That it's OK to cheat on a test as long as mom does it? That you could get anybody to take a test for you? That it isn't her responsibility to learn the material and take the test for herself? It's hard enough to get students to pay attention and do schoolwork to begin with. Are you so concerned that your child is going to be bad at something that you're willing to do the work for them so they don't feel that failure?

I have news for you, there. HPs who do work for their children are only setting their kids up for failure later on in life. Sure, you can do their homework (and even try to sneak into pre-scheduled tests and exams for them), but you won't be there to help them on that pop quiz or when they're randomly selected to lead the class discussion. Then you're setting them up to flounder in front of the entire class. This is why more and more teachers are sacrificing valuable in-class teaching time in order to do menial assignments which used to be done at home. If they have the student do the work in-class, then they know the student was the one who did the work. In addition, depending on how strict the plagiarism policy at any particular school is, doing your child's work for them can get them slapped with a plagiarism violation which can result in automatic complete failure of a course AND it looks horrible on a transcript, so you can probably kiss Harvard goodbye.

Here's another thing that HPs do which can be extremely detrimental: they try and control their child's schedule. I'm sure that Susie would love to have lunch and algebra and American history with her best friends Jill and Betty, but maybe that isn't the best thing for her. If she's struggling in a class, maybe she needs to be away from the people who are constantly distracting her by asking if she wants to go to the movies after school or if she thinks that new boy Ricky is cute. I can understand wanting your child to eat lunch with people they're already friends with, but have you considered that it might be a way for them to make new friends? So much of life after school relies on networking and the best way to prepare for that is to have a solid network of friends when you leave school. Jill and Betty will still be there after school (and maybe during third period Spanish because one class with friends is OK, but too many leads to problems). Kids need to learn how to make friends out of a situation where they feel they have none. Otherwise they're going to have a really bad time when they go off to college.

I was fortunate enough to never experience helicopter parenting. My parents made sure I was a responsible student who knew that my work was my job. As a result, I had a strong amount of confidence in my intellectual abilities going into college and consider myself pretty smart (having a boyfriend who continually tells me I'm one of the smartest people he knows helps, too). Because I'm so confident in the skills I've built up over the years, I don't fear any new challenge and instead I face it head-on. I was intimidated by the year-long internship I'm a part of when I was first informed that I would need to complete it, but I know I can do this. That's how I was raised.

PM

The Start of a New Week

I get to spend a fair amount of time observing my cooperating teacher's classes throughout the day. Often, watching her teach will give me an idea or two about something I would want to do in my own class. More often than not, though, I find myself caught up in just watching the students. I was out of touch with cool long before I chose the teacher path and it's hard for me to believe that half of what kids think is cool these days is actually cool. I don't understand "swag" or this recent obsession with My Little Pony. I guess these are just things I'm going to have to learn to understand and tolerate.

As far as my class goes, we've been having a good time together. A least, I think so. I taught them one of the few pieces of Ancient Greek that I remember on Friday. They seemed to find that pretty cool. We're still on Beowulf, but I'm getting more and more excited for our units on the Arthurian legends and the Canterbury Tales. For the Arthurian unit, we're going to do some reading aloud and we're going to attempt to piece together a family tree of sorts for some of the more important knights. Fr The Canterbury Tales, they're each going to create a Facebook style profile for a character by going off what is said about that character in the prologue. I think we might also watch at least part of A Knight's Tale just because I love Paul Bettany's portrayal of Chaucer. I think it would be amusing for them to see and hear him speak as Chaucer and to see if they can pick out any similarities between the two.

Until next time,

PM.

End Week One

It's the last day of my first week as an intern and I feel like it's gone as well as it could have. I've made a few small mistakes and even had to scramble to fill in time one day when a discussion fizzled out sooner than planned. I feel like I'm developing a pretty decent rapport with my students. There are a few that I think will be difficult (and one that I did not expect to be difficult... and one that I thought would be difficult, but who is actually turning out to be one of the most active and attentive students in the class), but that's to be expected. British literature really isn't everybody's cup of tea and I can respect that.

We're just shy of half-way through Beowulf. The students started drafting their Anglo-Saxon heroics yesterday and are due to turn in five lines to me for in-class workshopping today. This is something that I experienced in high school (I'm sure in no small part because of Penny Kittle's [http://pennykittle.net/] role as department head) and it's a teaching technique that I believe truly produces results. I'll be writing a poem alongside my class in order to model the writing process and to show them that even teachers struggle sometimes. To workshop these drafts (since they only need five lines) I'm going to collect hard copies and just transfer them to the board. Normally I'd probably ask for electronic copies so that I could project them onto the screen or print them onto overhead projector sheets, but I still have to do a "Google-How-To" with them because they're new to the whole idea of Drive/Docs.

On a slightly more humorous note: I'm only 5'4" and wearing flats for the first time this week. I'm quickly realizing that  a good portion of these high school students are actually taller than me. I have never missed my heels more than I did today while I was fighting my way through the throng of students and was mistaken for "one of them" despite having my lanyard and ID around my neck.

A Welcome

So this year I start the second leg of my journey in becoming a secondary English teacher and I thought it would be a good idea to catalog my experiences, to write down my struggles and successes so that I might look back on them later when I'm a (hopefully) wiser teacher.

I'm interning in an English class at Exeter High School--last period British Literature. My class is almost entirely boys and it's very small, but I really like it so far. The students are pretty well behaved for being in last period British Literature and we've had some pretty good discussions. I think my favorite so far is when our discussion on the traits of a hero became a debate on whether the Emperor from Star Wars could be considered a "hero" because, from his perspective and that of his followers, he fit many of the traits we had listed of a "hero".

There's two boys who are infinitely amusing. They sit across the room from each other and just love to debate ideas and topics. Unfortunately, the subjects they want to talk about aren't always relevant to the class discussion. It's still nice to see two teenage boys, a group whose interest is very hard to grasp if you aren't doing something active, become so involved in a discussion. I'm really looking forward to the papers that these two will be turning in eventually.

Right now we've just started our journey through the British Literature canon. We're about a third of the way through Beowulf and after that we'll be moving into some of the Arthurian Legends and then The Canterbury Tales. I'm going to have the kids compose "epic" poems in the Anglo-Saxon style (minimum 20 lines, at least 1 kenning per every 10 lines, no more than 50 lines) about a time when they felt heroic. For the Arthurian Legends unit, we'll be watching some pop culture adaptations of the legends and comparing/contrasting them. I haven't yet decided on a direction for The Canterbury Tales. I'm open to suggestions, though. I want to make it a fun unit because I know that the story itself is very, very dry in parts. I was thinking of showing either part or all of A Knight's Tale since it is a loose interpretation of one of the tales and this class has already asked for movies.

Later in the year we'll touch on Shakespeare--Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing (I really want to show them Joss Whedon's adaptation). The Victorian Era holds Frankenstein and King Solomon's Mines alongside poetry galore. We'll definitely get to Lewis Carroll (especially since I've had a few requests for his work in particular). More modern adventures will most likely include a trip through the galaxy with Douglas Adams and a look into a world that is frighteningly like what ours could become with 1984.

Since I'm just an intern, I don't have full access to programs like Moodle, turnitin.com, and the online gradebook used by EHS. To get around this, I've decided to expand on my knowledge of Google's services like Calendar and Drive/Docs to have students turn in work and to be able to post their assignments online for them to see. It's a huge experiment for all of us. I've used Drive in a similar fashion before, but never on this scale and the students are fairly new to the whole idea of Drive as far as I can tell so I may have to plan a technology how-to day in the near future.

For now, a farewell.
PM