Week 10

Seeing how Halloween fell at the end of this week, and everyone seemed to be getting in the spirit (especially on Friday, since students were allowed to wear costumes), I decided to apply this enthusiasm to this week’s curriculum.

As a pre-cursor, students were introduced to the literary elements irony and characterization. Students took notes, watched presentations, participated in class discussions, read stories and answered corresponding questions to build up their skills with these elements. After consistently working with these tools, I had determined (through various assessments) that students maintained proficient comprehension, so I had the students apply and utilize this skills with video clips that parodied a famous literature text, “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs. Previously, students had only been learning and practicing these skills with written literature, they had not yet had the opportunity to cover the skills learned on pieces of media. Through working with these diverse groups of students, I have discovered one common ground: students would prefer to utilize anything technological, as opposed to traditional text on paper. Given modern students’ over-stimulation of technology, it is not surprising that they find plain old paper boring and often respond better when some type of technology or media is involved. Technology resources can be found and used in a variety of fashions, and audio and/or video supplements are the most commonly complement literature texts.

Because of the overt attention given to media sources, I attempted to incorporate some of these supplements into the instruction, while adhering to the spooky anticipation that was in the air this Halloween week. The first classes in the beginning of the week were occupied by yet another class interruption, Acuity testing; this, however, did leave a majority of the rest of the week for a lesson centered around the uncanny holiday anticipation and media incorporation. Before reading “The Monkey’s Paw”, the students were given a pre-writing exercise, which focused on each student’s three personal wishes, which then led into a class discussion voicing these wishes and discussing the possible consequences of these wishes (which encompassed the theme: be careful what you wish for/want, because you just might get it…..at any cost). Then students were given the story (and corresponding vocabulary sheet) to read and comprehend. After class discussion, I was able to assess that students were competent, and understood the material presented while showing previously learned literacy application skills; therefore, students were shown an older black and white, Alfred Hitchcock adaptation. Students were then shown a more modern television show parody of the story. Throughout both videos, students were to apply their irony and characterization skills and take notes on the videos, which led into a whole class discussion from these exercises, I not only realized that students were more that capable to apply these skills, but they are much more stimulated and apt to participate when the audio/video material was integrated with the assigned literature. According to student feedback, students enjoyed seeing literature portrayed in other formats, and judging by student responses throughout the lesson, the students comprehended the material and were able to utilize previously introduced skills; also, students are much more interested when we, as educators, can construct traditional literary text and integrate corresponding media to better interest today’s students. All in all, this was a very productive and fun lesson that I think really complemented this week’s Halloween spirit.