The Lecture Hall we used for the week-long Project-Based Learning class.
Three weeks from today, I report back to St. Vincent Pallotti to begin my third year of teaching there. And yet, as this week began,I already began planning out lessons so the next few weeks will be a hybrid of relaxed summer time and gearing up for the grind.
Last week I was at the National Archives in College Park,enjoying a week-long session on Project Based Research. While geared to prep teachers to participate in National History Day, I wanted to learn more about the Library of Congress and Archive resources for my students’ research assignments. We learn by doing, so I spent the week building a mini-project on Yellow Journalism featuring the Yellow Kid, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Pulitzer.That was fun.
This year, as noted previously, I get the freshmen. I haven’t taught the grade since my very first year and this should be an interesting challenge. The grade seems to be cursed. During the 2017-18 year, the teacher we hired left after a month. Her replacement was a wonderful addition who I looked forward to working with until retirement. Unfortunately, during the 2018-19 year, she made the painful decision to leave partway through the year. Family first, I get that, but I do miss her.
Her replacement was a victim of staff reductions as our enrollment didn’t live up to expectations so, in the shuffle, I got the two sections of Introduction to Literature and Honors Introduction to Literature. Rounding out my schedule is one section of American Literature and one section of Honors British Literature. Yes, that means four preps which is a lot but at least two of these I’ve done before so the actual prep time will be less. Sadly, it also means there wasn’t room for Journalism, which disappoints me and I need to see what we can do going forward.
My predecessors left incomplete materials for me to work with so I have been carefully building the first Freshman Unit which is Mythology. While I gather they focused mostly on Greek, I am weaving in more Norse given the students’ familiarity with Thor (thank you, Stan and Jack). Prior to that, I need to review Literary Terms and the 8 Parts of Speech (Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Pronoun, Preposition, Conjunction, and Interjection, for those wondering)… Now, these are fairly dry things to kick the year off with so my hope is to introduce the material, given the students a Grammar diagnostic and integrate the rest of the learning through application unit by unit.
Our summer reading is The Hobbit, which I thankfullyreread about a year back and I can easily use that to segue into Myth via theHero’s Journey.
The next challenge will be to take the Freshman material anddifferentiate and accelerate it for the Honors students. I’ve already modifiedlessons on the Creation myth, so we’ll see what else I can come up with.
Deb is coming in for a few hours this weekend to help mewith some furniture repair and I bought myself a new desk chair that needsassembly. Then, I’ll need a day in the room to get things redecorated andorganized, working in Freshman material, and getting my three recently-donatedbookcases ready.
My thinking is if I do a little each day, plus time for myself, I can report in a mere twenty days, without feeling stress.
And the countdown continues…
#Tags: 8 Parts of Speech, Freshmen, Greek myth, Literary Terms, National Archives, National History Day, Norse myth, slider, St- Vincent Pallotti, The Hobbit