Thursday, Mar. 31, 2005
lit circles, posted at 11:49 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com There's this unit that I wrote into the English I curriculum a couple of years ago when I wrote it that I've never gotten to. It's a Lit Circles unit that I've hoped to teach but we always end up fighting the schedule to finish even Romeo and Juliet at the end of the year. This year, I decided to do it in between To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet, mainly because I wanted to give the kids a little something over spring break and have them do some at-home reading in the first weeks of April.Therefore, I crafted a six-book Lit Circles assignment in which the kids could choose any of these books: Drift by Manuel Luis Martinez, A Yellow Raft on Blue Water by Michael Dorris, Life of Pi by Yann Martell, Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, and In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. Students got to pick which book they wanted to read, and they're in groups of four or five reading the first third over break.
I've read all these books in the last two years, except for Catcher, which I don't think I've read for about five years. Still, I've had to re-read them all to prepare to make the quizzes, construct the projects, and refresh my memory on the details. This is my fourth reading of Catcher, and it fits me like a well-worn shoe. Holden's voice is as distinctive and authentic as ever. And I'm blown away, again, by Bee Season, which is the best novel I've read as an adult. I love how it's ostensibly this book about spelling bees, but it's mostly about faith, and I love her use of language, and how the wheels on that family come off so surprisingly as the novel progresses. I discovered tonight that a film of it, starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, will be released in the middle of this year. We'll see how that is.
Anyhow, I've been reading the first third of all these books, plus trying to do some fun reading of my own lately - I read some Anne Lamott (Some Thoughts on Faith... I'm really in a finding answers phase right now) and Walter Mosely (The Man in my Basement, which was just alright). So I've done a lot of reading on this spring break.
I'm not really sure how I'm going to direct things with these lit circles on Monday. I promised them a quiz over their reading, then a discussion in the small groups. I'm going to have to deal with a few kids who will complain that they couldn't find their book even though they had weeks to do so, and I have to figure out how to deal with them. I've never done anything with Literature Circles before, so I'm feeling my way through it the first time. But I'm excited. I'm trying to make it as student centered as I can without making it a free for all. I also want to make sure that kids who did not do the reading are not able to "get by," which is how I survived much of high school and college - being smart enough to fake it. I really respect the first teacher (college) who just flat out failed me because I didn't complete the reading. He would give reading check quizzes and I just hadn't read The Rape of the Lock or The Life and Times of Tristam Sandy or whatever else he had wanted us to, and I just flat out failed; my good writing skills couldn't get me by. I look at that guy as a turning point for me.
Sometimes I have no idea why I write an entry. Wander, wander, wander, and no real point.