a teaching moment...

anyone reading this blog might have gotten the impression that i am a little fried with teaching. my negativity has likely been pretty palatable. however, just like angel pennies, moments occur out of nowhere that make you reinvest in the concept that there is something good in the world. i had a moment of that last week.

i have assigned my advanced classes a project that i have done for years. it involves teaching a poem called "the permanent delegate" which is about the holocaust and a plea for people not to forget what happened. i put the class into 4 teams and they have to teach it, piece by piece, word by word. what i am looking for is thinking outside of the box and looking at each word, each image as something unique that could be interpreted in various ways.

since i started this project, i have written on a couple of copies of the poem all new interpretations that each group over the years has come up with. a few years ago i realized that they had covered the basic stuff, but that i wanted more from the students. so thus the BINGO was invented. basically, to even have a chance of the group getting an A on their part of the project they must make me write something new on the sheet. not an easy task, since i have heard most of it over the years.

not much was expected on my part. basically, these kids aren't doing much comprehension or analysis to the extent of previous years. i figured after last year when i had groups that got no bingos, that there wasn't any chance of that happening.

in my lowest skill wise class of advanced the miracle occurred.

first group: 7 bingos. i was quite shocked. they really worked hard and the neat thing was that the information spread to the other 2 classes. by the afternoon the b4 class had heard about b2's 7 bingos and wanted to beat them. they almost did. the bar got set BY THE STUDENTS and on we went.

when the 2nd group got up to do their section of the poem, i almost cried. they had gone to college level analysis. they had PowerPoint's, excepts from other writings, were analyzing the lines inside and out, from a jewish perspective, from a christian perspective, from a german historical perspective. they have not finished and already they have 10 bingos. i stopped writing down things and just listened, mesmerized, as they went on and on. the neat thing is that the kids NOT presenting were also participating. in the first group all but 2 kids in the class contributed to the class discussion and those new ideas didn't get counted as bingos because they didn't come from the presenters!

today my a4 class presented, and while it was good, it was a little boring in some ways. the kids in that class are not participating in the same way, which i sort of expected. and in a way, it is sort of sad because you know you can't keep up the momentum. however, you want to try!

this whole thing made me feel like they finally got it. i don't know what flipped the switch, but i think i am going to do this poetry unit in the fall instead of the spring next year. it seems to me that they were better able to analyze smaller things, like the poem, vs. the short stories and books we read. the big chunks they couldn't seem to consume. little pieces, yes.