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.