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