Changes to Class for Next Year

Our English department is in the stage of the curriculum cycle where we will be buying new curriculum and instituting it next year.

We, along with the middle school, decided to go with the textbooks, Collections, for our text book series.

There were a couple key reasons we went with Collections instead of another textbook series:

1.  It comes with a subscription to TURN IT IN, which will allow us to instantly check for plagiarism.

2.  It is aligned with the common core.

3.  The selections are more modern and, hopefully, relevant to our students.  This caused some debate within our department.  Collections' literature selections are so modern that many aren't deemed "classics" (think dead white Europeans).  For each unit there certainly are "classic" pieces of literature, just not the standard ones (think "Young Goodman Brown," "The Bride Comes to Yellowsky," "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Rocking Horse Winner," "Barn Burning," "Hills Like White Elephants" and, of course, Shakespeare.

    ** personally, this doesn't bother me one bit for several reasons:

    First, our ACT scores already are low, so the classic stories that we've been teaching obviously  
    haven't had an impact.  So what's the big deal in trying a different approach?

    Second, I think by having us teach new stories and poems that we aren't as familiar with will help
   us step out of our comfort zones and try new things, which, hopefully, will have a greater impact on
   our students.  I was most impressed with our middle school teachers who really stressed trying
   something different.  Now the key thing here is that we don't just revert back to the same 12 or 14
   stories that we have always taught (guilty as charged here, too.  More on how I'm trying to combat
   that later).  What we want to avoid is spending tens of thousands of dollars on new textbooks that
   just sit on the shelves and don't actually get used because we just went back to teaching what we
   always have taught.

   Third, when I first started teaching, I was hardcore on the classics.  I believed all of that stuff about
   getting students to fall in love with literature and contributing a verse and discovering their souls
   and all that jazz.  It was right out of Dead Poets Society.  I couldn't imagine not teaching a student
   to love Robert Frost or Langston Hughes.  I felt like it was a crime against humanity if I didn't do
   that.  Mark Bauerlein would've loved it.

   Now, however, I'm actually on the opposite side of things.  I realized that I thought all of those
   things because I was passionate about them, not necessarily that it was what was best for students,
   especially students in the 21st century.

   I'm not sure when my shift in thinking occurred.  Maybe it was when I went to graduate school at
   BSU and saw how little literature was actually part of the non-English curriculum (we devoted the
   last half of the second semester to it.  The rest of the curriculum was focused solely on
   composition).

   Maybe it was later when I read The World is Flat and realized that the world my students would be
   entering was most certainly not the one I thought I was preparing them for.

   Then maybe it was reinforced when one of our teachers, Mrs. Stock, surveyed the syllabi of several
   colleges from around the state and realized that most freshmen composition courses hardly even
   touch on literature.

   So as it stands now, I don't think any kids' life will be less rich if they don't read Beowulf, The Great  
  Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, The Jungle, Moby Dick, and Great Expectations.  Understand this, I'm
   not opposed to any of these works.  They are all exceptional and worthy reads.  But to believe - as I
   once did - that a person's life will be less rich having not read these works is ridiculous.

   I mean - come on - in the hay day of American public education, the 1950s, fewer than half of all
   students even graduated!  So do we think they all read the classics in school?  If we traveled back in
   time and visited a family home on an autumn Saturday afternoon, do we honestly think they'd all be
   huddled around the dining room table pouring over the classics?  That's ridiculous.  That past never
   existed. So why perpetuate it?

   So where do I stand now?  I'm far more interested in getting students to think critically about the
   flat world around them and how they fit in a global economy.  I'm far more interested in striving to
   get kids to find their "extras" (again, borrowing a term from Friedman) and to get them to
   understand their "whys" (again, I'm borrowing from Simon Sinek here).  I'm far more interested in
   helping students uncover their passions (I'm borrowing from Ken Robinson here), in getting
   students to realize the key to college and success in the flat world is the craftsman's mindset and
   career capital (I'm borrowing from Cal Newport here), and that maybe the most important thing
   they can understand is that the must always be life long learners who have a growth mindset (I'm
   borrowing from Carol Dweck here).

   Ultimately, I guess I care more about students uncovering and exploring the concepts listed in the
   previous paragraph than I am about turning students into little English majors.  But I do believe that
   teachers can still get kids to do all of that through reading and writing and thinking.  It can be done
   through The Great Gatsby or The Ghost Map.  Maybe the real answer is a combination.  And that's
   what I'm striving for in my College Comp curriculum.

That brings me to the changes I want to try and institute in my College Comp curriculum.

In the past I started College Comp with the tradition essay progression - descriptive, narrative, how to, persuasive, film review, literary analysis, comparison essay, and finally a 6-8 page essay in which students read two classic novels and then compared three themes shared by the novels.

All of that used to get accomplished in a 9 week course called College Prep Comp!  So when it was switched to an entire semester, I took some liberties to add more drafts (for the descriptive essay, I have students do three rough drafts.  Then they choose one to peer edit and eventually develop into a final draft).  Eventually, I added two nonfiction selections (The Element and The Dip) to the course as well.  But I feel like more can still be accomplished.  I can get the students to work harder and learn more.

Just recently, I tweaked the curriculum some more.  I decided to have students write two smaller literary analysis papers on their novels rather than comparing them both at the end of the semester.  At the end of first quarter, students write a literary analysis paper (minimum of two sources) analyzing three examples of one theme from their first novel.  And just this year, I will have students write a multi-genre literature paper on their second novel.

I changed this for a couple of reasons.  First, when students read two novels and then compared them at the end of the semester, often students would forget details from their first novel (which they read during first quarter).  Second, students were limited to choosing novels that actually had themes in common.  I didn't like this because sometimes students would choose an excellent novel (The Great Gatsby) but then they'd be limited to choosing a book with similar themes from the novels list.  This often meant choosing another work by that same author.  In the case of Fitzgerald, that meant the students reading Gatsby and then having to settle for one of his lesser works.  The same was true for The Catcher in the Rye, where students had to settle and read Franny and Zooey.  It's not that those novels are bad, but I wished there was a way for students to read The Catcher in the Rye and then still have the freedom to read another excellent novel regardless of whether it shared themes with The Catcher in the Rye.  So I decided to do two different papers for the novels.  This way a student may choose to read The Great Gatsby first quarter and write a traditional research paper and then read To Kill a Mockingbird (which doesn't have all that much in common to Gatsby) and do a multi-genre literature paper on that.

So here is what I plan to change College Comp 1 to -

First half -

Descriptive Essay (students will write three drafts and select one to develop into a final draft for submission).

Narrative Essay (ditto).

How to (students will write two drafts on how to improve LHS and how to survive college).

Then students will read Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map.  Students will analyze it and eventually write a multi-genre literature paper on it.

Students will read The Element and write a braided essay on it.

Students will read The Dip and write a series of personal essays related to the topics discussed in it.


Second half -

Students will read Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist and develop lesson plans for two chapters and teach those chapters to the class.

Students will read several "classic" short stories ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "A Rose for Emily," "The Things They Carried," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber") and write a literary analysis on "Young Goodman Brown."

Students will write a comparison essay of "Young Goodman Brown" to Training Day.

We will end the semester with students having the option to choose one classic novel from the novels list.  Then they will write a standard 6-8 page research paper (minimum of 4 sources) on the novel.


In terms of College Comp 2, I would like to change things around even more.

Quarter 1

First Day Essay (due first day of the class)

Exploratory Essay (due start of the second week)

Dumbest Generation Project (due end of the third week)

Everything Bad is Good for You (Telescoping/Probing paper and multiple narrative thread theory) (due end of the fifth week)

Talk Like TED – Give students Wednesdays first quarter to develop their own version of a ten minute TED Talk (to be given in the Business room or in the training center).  This would be the cumulative final assignment for quarter 1.

Then we'd end the quarter with the Sticky-Note Book Report – hyper text blog.  Here I have students list three topics/subjects they want to read more about.  I also have them write down one thing they absolutely do not want to read about.  Then from that list, I select a nonfiction book for them to read, annotate with Sticky-Notes, give a 10 minute book talk on in front of the class, and then write a hyper-text essay on a blog they create devoted to the book.

Quarter 2

Mindset – The Growth Mindset.  Students would read this and write a series of APA papers related to it. 

So Good They Can’t Ignore You.  Students will create an infographic that illustrates the craftsman’s mindset.

Where Good Ideas Come from Students will gigsaw this and teach a chapter to the class with the help of a faculty/administrative partner.

Linchpin.  Students will write an essay in which they analyze their linchpin ability and then create a finalLinchpin essay and final Linchpin board presentation.

Multi-Genre Research Paper

Passion Project presentation (spend each Wednesday second quarter devoted to this project which will be shared the final two weeks of the semester).

Students will end the semester with an exit interview at Digi Key where they will be asked questions about all that they have learned in CC 2 and how they plan to apply it to their futures.

I just hope I get the go ahead to put some of these changes into practice before the start of second semester.