Close reading Activity

                                                           LESSON PLAN TEMPLATE

SUBJECT/COURSE:   College Literature                                                  DATE:  12-11-16

CONCEPT/OBJECTIVE:

Students will be able to close read a foreign piece of literature and translate the meaning into understandable content for the class members.

MATERIALS NEEDED FOR LESSON:

           (by you):

*A word cloud of the prologue for the Canterbury Tales. 

*A handout of the prologue for the Canterbury Tales written in Middle English.

           (by the students):

*Paper and Pencil

*Cooperative and investigative attitude

INTRODUCING THE LESSON:

Journal write: What is a pilgrimage?  What are their purposes?  Can you think of any examples?  The lesson will begin with a background introduction to Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales.  A word cloud will be used of the Prologue to display the important words used. 

INSTRUCTIONAL PROCEDURE:

Journal write

Powerpoint on Canterbury Tales background

Discuss how background knowledge is important when trying to close read and create a clear understanding of a text.

Display the Prologue word cloud and give students 5 minutes to quick write about the things that they notice in the word cloud.

Discuss with the class the things that they notice and how those thoughts will help analyze the Prologue.  Discuss how these elements and background knowledge on the subject aid in close readings.

Go over the close reading checklist with the students and handout a copy to each of them.

Model a close reading of the Canterbury Tales Prologue lines 1-18 with the class.

Separate the students into small group discussion group of roughly 4 students/group

The groups will close read lines 19-34 of the Prologue and write down a translation line by line of the section.

The groups will then share out their translations and why they went with certain meanings over others.

The class can then read a published translation of the work and write a reflection on which group’s translation they liked the best and why.

The students will end with a share out as a class of what close reading steps they enacted from the list and other processes their mind engaged in to make meaning of the text.  What helped, what didn’t?

ASSESSMENT: The students will be assigned a literature piece for the following class that they will close read.  They will read for meaning, themes, word choice, etc. and come to class with a 1 page write up of the close reading of the text and share out their thoughts and turn them in.

CLOSURE:

The students will end with a share out as a class of what close reading steps they enacted from the list and other processes their mind engaged in to make meaning of the text.  What helped, what didn’t?

Close Reading Handout

It will help if you read your lines aloud.  This often makes it easier to notice repetitive imagery and meter.  Pay special attention to what is happening if you see the imagery change – what is happening there.  When an author changes something such as meter or imagery, they are drawing attention to something!  Keep in mind, however, that Middle English syntax was different from ours. English and grammar were also different.  They did not have the fixed rules that we’re familiar with.  The spelling, and the order, of words will seem awkward to you.  As you construct your translation, keep that in mind.  Write in a way that is natural and which makes sense to you. 

Look up any words that you are unsure of!  Even if they mean close to what our modern word means, they may have other implications.  I have found the Middle English Dictionary in the website above to be a useful starting point.  For example, the words “shoures” and “soote” in the first line looked odd to me.  When I searched “shoures” in the OED, I didn’t find any entry.  I went to the Middle English Dictionary in the website referenced above and found that this is “showers.”  Then I went to the OED to see if there were any further implications beyond rainfall.  This is where reading aloud to others may help:  try reading “shoures” and you may automatically fall into saying something like “showers.”  You still need to make sure of the meaning, however. 

Check the meaning of any familiar looking word such as that “soote” in the first line.  It looks like the modern “soot.”  When you look up the word in the OED, you will see our modern sense of the word listed in the first definition – that is, a black carbonaceous substance or deposit consisting of fine particles formed by the combustion of coal, wood, oil, or other fuel (OED online, 1. a.).  However, in the next two entries we find references to something sweet, and the first one makes sense when talking about winds in April:  Sweet to the smell or taste; sweet-smelling, fragrant (OED online, 2. a. 1.)  That makes sense.  In short, what meaning works within the imagery?

Keep the author and context in mind and look up any references you are unsure of.  Just as we kept the context of the image within the text in mind, think of the author and his society.  Chaucer was much more aware of mythology and classic literature than we are.  We don’t universally study Greek and Latin as part of a University education anymore. You will need to look up references to figures such as “Zephirus” in line 5.  The modern spelling is “Zephyrus.”  He is the Greek god of the West Wind, and was thought of as a “fructifying” wind.  That is, Zephyr embodies the winds we see in Spring weather.  The implication that these winds help breathe new growth into life. How does that work throughout these lines?

The words and images we see above, Chaucer is consistently using the imagery of Nature in Spring.  As you work through your section, find any patterns of imagery, of character, of voice.  Trace the way that Chaucer builds those ideas and what you think their implications are.  Throughout the first 18 lines there are many images of nature.  How is Chaucer using them?  What else is he referring to (in language which may be more obscure to us then to his audience)?  HINT:  what is going on in line 11?  Who is acting and on what, and on who? 

For that matter, where are we?  What is the setting and why are we there?  Chaucer describes a natural world in lines 1-11.  In the next few lines, we suddenly see a destination.  Why is that important and what does that imply for the patterns we’ve seen so far?  Where are we going and why?  What is the tone of the language Chaucer uses in these descriptions?  Is this an active or passive voice?  What does that imply for the setting described? 

Watch for sudden changes.  For example, in line 12, people make a sudden appearance.  Ask yourselves why Chaucer chose to set the stage with the imagery of lines 1-11 before introducing the general type of character (“folk” and “palmeres”) and the action we will follow them on throughout the book (“pilgrimages”).  What is the connection beyond the practicality of travel to the imagery of spring and the idea of going to Canterbury “the hooly blisful martir for to seke?” (17).  What theme, then do we see in this connection and is that theme carried through the following lines?

In short, try to identify the theme or themes.  I see a connection between the images of renewal in Spring and religious pilgrimage within the first 18 lines.  What does that imply for the ways in which we look at these lines, and the following lines.  Does Chaucer continue with that theme? 

To sum up, we are looking for words and images, patterns and changes in patterns to construct a meaning.  We are trying to identify who is operating and what they are doing.  We are building an understanding based on:

            Word meanings, word patterns

            Imagery meanings and patterns

            Characters and their actions

            The tone of voice and the mood it creates

            Themes

PowerPoint

http://www.slideshare.net/ChristieZablocki/chaucer-history

"Real World" Assignments

     There is a push in education to make learning "real world" applicable, yet I think many times we still fall short of that mark because we make learning that "could" be applied to the real world, but the project does not require that component.  The article by Davidson called, "How to go from standard-issue term paper to social change", was an article that responded to and accomplished the task of real-world learning in school assignments.  The professor has the students create wiki pages for under-represented groups as a final project in the class.  This assignment is genius on so many levels.
     The first level of genius that is explicitly discussed in the article is the idea of no professor wanting to grade a paper that a student has hurriedly thrown together the night before it is due.  As a college student, I also know this struggle of managing your time trying not to do projects at the last minute but sometimes it's inevitable.  The assignment of creating a wiki page helps to eliminate this issue because rough drafts of work are not something that will meet the standards of publication to the site.  It also states that the edits are tracked and the professor can see those changes, so it is documented how often and to what extent each document is being changed.
     The next level of genius is that the students are creating a document that will be made public.  I do not believe that there is a college student that does not take more time on an assignment when they know that there will be more than just their professor's eyes looking at it.  It puts far more pressure on the student to engage in something that is high quality.  I find that it is a human quality that we want to present the best portrait of ourselves to the world, and this type of projects forces a student's hand to do just that.  This idea of wanting to put our best work out for the public leads back to the multiple corrections and the time that will be exerted on this type of writing assignment.
     The final level of genius is that it is actual "real world" writing.  It is writing that is done for the world and is public to the world.  It is not a piece of writing that could theoretically be useful to the world, it is useful in the production of the work.  It is something that they can take in pride in because they have made a useful contribution to the world.  They also can use the writing on their resumes for employers to see.
     All of these different levels of genius contribute to the formation of a "real world" assignment that hits the mark on many levels and creates transformational and empowering learning on the part of the student.  The impact of such an assignment will not be forgotten by the student.

Technology and Education

     I don't know if there are many things that teachers agree on about technology and the use of it in the classroom, but there is one idea that they do agree on: technology is always changing and at quite a rapid pace.  I know that there is a spectrum for teachers and technology use in the classrooms.  On one end there are the teachers that find it to be the best thing since sliced bread for their classrooms.  On the other end of the spectrum are teachers that are annoyed by it and think it is a distraction from the "real learning" that needs to take place.  In the middle of this spectrum is where I believe many teachers lie; these teachers see the benefits and downfalls of technology and thus do not reside at one extreme or the other.  Wherever teachers lie on the spectrum, it does need to be acknowledged that technology is not going away, and it is an important part of most students lives.

     Knowing that technology is an important part of students lives leads many teachers to the belief that it should be incorporated in some way into their teaching environments.  There are many small scale and large scale ways to incorporate technology, but I was particularly impressed by an article I recently read called, "The Twitter Essay" by Jesse Stommel.  This article discussed the use of Twitter in the classroom as a learning tool, in particular, to write essays.  This idea had never occurred to me. Yes, I have used Twitter in my college classes before, but only as a way to post out thoughts on something that was discussed or that happened in class.  I never thought about a Twitter essay before because really who can write an essay in a mere 140 characters?  The article made a great point though that it is about being concise with your words, which is an important skill to have.  As someone that is constantly told that I am too wordy, this is something that I struggle with on my own Twitter posts.  I have found that for posts that I am passionate about, I know what I want to say and it will take me several revisions before I accomplish that on Twitter with the characters allowed.  It really makes me focus on what I deem to be the important words and parts of the message that I am trying to convey.

     I think that this aspect of being concise with your words is probably one of the best ways that Twitter can be used in the classroom.  I learn a lot about different theorists that have laid the groundwork in education and I know that I would struggle to tweet out what each theorist's major contributions are in 140 characters.  Yet, this task would give me a chance to really hone in on what I believe are the MOST important contributions and why I think that they are the most important.  That work is a critical analysis, and that is the work we want our students to become engaged within our classes.  Dismissing these opportunities to engage our students with technology that they use on a daily basis is a misstep for educators.  We need to become creative like Stommel and figure out how to make the student's everyday technology work for our purposes. 

Specs and Standards-Based Grading

     I became a proponent of Standards Based Grading (it is quite similar to Specs grading) before I left the secondary level of schooling.  It made sense to me, grade students on mastery of the content/standards that were important to your class.  It was so much more concise looking at the assignments I was going to give and seeing how they aligned to the standards that they were going to be graded on.  I found that it cut down on needless busy work assignments that I never found the time to grade anyway.  I wanted to focus on the important standards for my class, not filling time, and standards-based grading helped me do that.  Now do not get me wrong, as the lone ranger of this model in my school, it was not an easy road to travel.
     The idea behind this type of grading is that you are looking for students to re-visit work and continue to improve on standards, and it also helped to focus on the specific areas of weakness instead of the work as a whole.  For example, I have many students that did wonderfully citing their sources and using correct grammar in their papers, but some struggled with explaining their evidence and linking it back to their claim.  So I then conferenced with them about this skill and gave them the practice to help them with this specific skill.  I didn't have to waste time on the skill of citation because I had already assessed that they had mastered that skill.  I also liked that it let the students know what was expected at every level of performance on every standard (I based the levels off the rubrics that I already used for their writing), this gave the students ownership over their learning and how much effort they wanted to put forth and invest in their own learning.  There were some students that said I am okay with a C because I plan to be a mechanic and I won't do a lot of writing in my profession.  I had to respect their choice and that allowed me time with the students that struggled but really wanted to push their knowledge to the next level.
     As I said, it wasn't an easy road because I had to conform to the school's grading system while trying to implement the standards.  For me, I would've rather had a report that listed each standard and how the student performed on each one, but that doesn't work with GPA and sports eligibility which made my life a bit difficult trying to convert it.  Another issue that I had with grading is that standards-based grading is based on a philosophy of constantly redoing to achieve mastery.  This put a lot of extra work on me, especially when all of my students wanted to redo things at the end of the semester; however, I didn't want to deny them a chance at mastery, so I ran myself ragged trying to keep up.  This is where I think that Nilson in her "Specifications Grading" book is a genius!  She talks about tokens.  Giving students a certain amount of tokens that they can use on redo's and late submissions would have been an extremely useful technique for me.  It would have put the ownership on the students to really put forth their best work in the beginning because they could only have so many redos.  Some would argue that this flies in the face of the philosophy of this grading style because it is about mastery no matter when that occurs in the course, but there does need to be ownership on the student to make sure they are submitting their best work the first time, and a teacher can only do so much.
     I think that this grading is where schooling is going, and I couldn't be happier about it.  From the two short years that I enacted it in my classrooms, I could see the students that were really self-motivated to learn at the highest level.  It really became less about the letter grade and more about where do I go from here?  How can I do better? And to me that is what schooling should always be about!

Monsters and Others

     Race/racism and sexuality in literature can be difficult topics to discuss in any literature classroom, even at the collegiate level.  The topics are so difficult to discuss in part because they are wrapped up in so many personal values and beliefs of students in the classroom.  This throws many barriers in the way of looking at the content because the reader must first acknowledge their own biases and beliefs before they can analyze the beliefs that are portrayed within a piece of literature.
     Last week we read an article by Zuba called, "Monstrosity and Majority: Defamiliarizing Race in the college classroom".  The author talked about taking the approach of first dealing with monsters in the text and how they are portrayed and why, before moving to race and how different races are perceived and portrayed in literature.  This technique allows the students to be objective because they are not emotionally/culturally invested in how monsters are portrayed.  They are open to receiving these portrayals and thoughts and they are open to analyzing why they are portrayed in this light.  Consequently, when the students move from monsters to looking at a race they can more easily continue to use the lenses that they were previously looking at the literature through.
     This concept is similar to the article that we read this week called, "Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes" by Zeikowitz.  He states, "The pedagogical approach I propose here is not restricted to analyzing critically how some medieval texts construct queer/ normative boundaries. Reading queer also invites students to examine how their own cultural backgrounds influence their response to monstrous Others in medieval texts. A queer pedagogical approach to medieval literature thus has a political agenda: its overall goal is to create a society more accepting of difference" (76).  As a teacher, we can see that it is important to critically engage with a text to understand why characters are portrayed a certain way and how that relates or conflicts with beliefs and portrayals in the present day.  Readers need to recognize how their own cultural backgrounds influence how they read and interpret literature to be able to critically analyze the role of the character portrayals within literary works.
    "Giroux's critical pedagogy does not rest with reevaluating the past. He suggests that it can transform contemporary society. This transformation can occur only if students come to realize the part they play in an exploitative and unjust society. A queer critical pedagogy leads students who do not consider themselves oppressed marginalized, or silenced to examine the position of "queer" in texts as well as contemporary society, and, most important, it encourages these students to evaluating critically the role they may play in the denigration of both fictional and "real" queers (68-69)."  This is the political agenda that we see played out in all of these articles, from Zuba to Zeikowitz to Winans.  It is the idea of evaluating your understanding of your role in society of creating the "Others" and once that understanding is present, only then can you begin to "transform contemporary society".  This I would argue is some of the most important work that can be accomplished in a literature classroom, the literature is simply the vehicle to lead to that social understanding and change in society.

 

 

 

The Unemotional Teacher

     As I was reading Showalter's Teaching Literature, I came upon a chapter called "Teaching Literature in Dark Times".  In this chapter, she focuses on what options/reactions are appropriate to responding to current events (generally of importance to the mass population).  Showalter doesn't give a guide for a way that these events should be handled, rather she depicts several options that other professors have used and their results and reflections upon their handling of the event.  Showalter cites the thoughts of Rosenblatt by saying, "Rosenblatt believes that the teacher of literature should not assume a mask of unemotional objectivity or impartial omniscience".  Showalter also addresses the issue that teachers are not guided or taught possible responses in such matters, which can lead to an impulse reaction rather than a well thought out response plan.
     For sure there is no one size fits all plan for how to respond to a devastating effect as a teacher, but I do think that it is something that needs to be discussed at all levels.  I think that many people's knee-jerk reaction is to pretend that nothing has happened and go on with life/class as usual.  I think that this is a mistake, especially in the humanities; after all, I think part of this discipline is teaching humanity.  I clearly remember sitting in a college class when 9/11 occurred, no one rushed in to stop class and tell us what was happening.  We walked out of that class to a changed world.  Even after that class, not a single one of my classes ever discussed 9/11 and its repercussions in class.  One teacher commented on the sporadic attendance since the event, but just as a reminder that attendance is part of the grade no matter what.
     Another instance in my collegiate career was when I was heading to a meeting with a professor before our class started; outside the college, one of my classmates in that class took his helmet off and went to do a wheelie on his bike when he hit a parked car and flew off his bike smacking into the sidewalk head first.  I walked past him on my way to the meeting directly after it occurred, and I remember seeing his head cracked open.  I quickly walked away in shock and headed to my meeting. My professor could see that I was clearly shaken up and he did ask what was wrong, I told him about the student in class and what had happened and then we began our intended meeting.  The professor held class, despite the shock and awe of the students that began receiving texts that he did not make it.  The next week the professor did take a few moments to discuss his reflections on the past week and the revelation that he feels it would have been better to cancel class, as it wasn't a productive class anyway.
     I do not believe that instructors have to totally rearrange their syllabi to accommodate these events, but I do believe that it is our duty to acknowledge and give space to discuss these events.  I think that we need to be the frontline in demonstrating that everyone is human and these types of events do affect people.  They can change your mindset and your priorities, and that is not something that we should be glossing over if we want to create students that are not simply automatons.  Being humane and discussing life-altering events is not a waste of curricular time, it is necessary to humanity and especially the humanities.

Bad Revision

     I am quite interested in the idea of "close reading" texts for a number of reasons.  One of the reasons is that since common core has entered the scenes of the K-12 curriculum it has been a front and center focus.  There are numerous professional developments that exist to teach teachers the craft of instructing and grading close readings.  As a participant in one of those professional developments, the focus was to get students to interrogate the text.  As questions of who wrote it and why, what historically was going on while it was written, how did they format the text, and why did they choose the words and the format that they did (what purpose does it serve for the text as a whole)?  This is similar to the ideas that were put forth in our readings this week also, to interrogate a text and it's choices within, but the article by Kelemen brought up an interesting point.  Kelemen discussed close reading in an assignment that included critical editing and within he hits on an idea that never occurred to me.
     Kelemen discusses an assignment where he has the students critically edit a poem of Chaucer's.  He has students start "with a handful of the manuscripts...Students then transcribe and collate the texts" (Kelemen, 130).  The students then decide what type of editorial focus they will have when they rework the text and then they look at the words and the punctuation and decide what stays and how and what needs to change (Kelemen, 130).  The assignment already has me intrigued, but the brilliance comes into play when he says that the work he expects them to turn will be horrible reworkings of the original.  It isn't until the end when he illuminates the genius of why it's okay to assign this assignment and fully expect horrible results.  He says, "Exposing the inexperience is itself good: students come to know much better not only what sorts of expertise editing requires but also what severity of discipline an edition's exactitude and correctness involves" (Keleman, 136).
     I have always been consumed with everything that I do increasing student's knowledge, that I hadn't considered that having students understand and have an appreciation for what they don't know is also a valuable experience in their learning.  Even through this "bad" reproduction of the work, he says that his students say that they have never been more familiar with a text.  Their own hands-on production of the work has allowed them the insight to understand all the elements of the text better and how the text would or would not be better served written in another format, which gives them a greater understanding of why the text was chosen to be written in the format that it was.  It seems so simple in retrospect, deconstructing and reconstructing a text gives you an intimate knowledge of how it works as a whole, the same way deconstructing and reconstructing a watch allows you to better understand it's inner workings.