The very best moment of this morning's class occurred when a student asked a simple question: "Are we allowed to look up words?"
Yes! Please! Look up every single word if it will help you understand the poem!
This was in my Sports Literature class, which introduces firts-year students to the fine art of literary analysis. I wanted to hit them right off the bat with the important distinction between emotional and analytical responses to literature, but this group needs to take things in small steps, so over the summer I created a Prezi that dramatizes the process. And if this thing is working right, you can see it here:
My goal today was to kick them right off that very comfortable bottom step ("I feel, I can relate, It reminds me of the time...") and help them step up toward Understanding, so I showed them a short poem, put them in groups of three, asked them to work together to understand the poem, and then left the room for a few minutes. (Small-group discussion can be thwarted if the students feel as if I'm looming over them, so I often step out for a drink of water or a brief chat with a colleague.)
The minute I walked back into the classroom, a student threw his hand in the air and asked, "Are we allowed to look up words?"
I wanted to do my happy dance right there in the classroom. I even gave the class a one-time release from the no-cell-phone policy and encouraged them to look up any unfamiliar term, and within seconds I heard groups talking out which definition of eccentricity might apply to a poem about baseball and what the differences might be between errant, arrant, and aberrant.
It took a few minutes but they soon convinced me that they understood the poem, and they even started making some leaps toward analysis (which wasn't part of the lesson plan). Some of them even liked the poem--but not until they'd made the effort to understand it.
See, it doesn't take much for students to make me really happy. Sometimes all it takes is a simple question.
1 comment:
Nice!
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