Redkudu: The Beginning

In order to begin planning for the year, I have to take into account what resources are available to me. This means textbooks and individual books (novels) the department has available. We do have a textbook but our teachers rarely use it. It's quite old, and there aren't enough for all English III teachers to have a classroom set. It's also an enormous book, so difficult to get kids to bring it to class. Our school is overcrowded - students in the higher grades rarely get lockers, as there aren't enough, so asking them to lug a huge textbook to and from class simply doesn't work. The only thing we usually use the text for is to read "The Crucible," so we try to stagger our reading of this among the team so we can borrow one another's books.

I know from experience that we have enough of the following novels to provide a take-home copy for all of my students: The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451. Most everything else we might want to use we generally only have enough for classroom copies, and some of those are reserved for the AP classes. This makes reading a novel a verrrrrrrry slow process when it can only be done in class.

To begin with, I separate my calender into the six chunks that represent our six weeks grading periods. I prefer to teach to a timeline, so that connections can be made between literature that came before and how its ideas influenced literature that followed. To that end, I begin with Native American folklore and rhetoric, and generally end with Fahrenheit 451. This year, I'm going to attempt to squeeze in "The Things They Carried" near the end, if possible. For each chunk I try to come up with a theme of sorts, just to remind myself of the focus. After considering the literature available to me, I consider the literary concepts most strongly represented, and look for repetition of the concepts in supplemental works. Here then, is my broadest outline for the year (this is how I jot them down in my notes). You can see where I am in my planning by the specificity of my notes.

1st 6 weeks: Native Foundations and Rhetoric (this unit complete)

• Major literary concepts: tone, imagery, simile, irony
  
• 1st 3 weeks: Native American Folklore: creation tales and tricksters, close reading, tone, imagery
• 
  2nd 3 weeks: Native American Rhetoric: several speeches, persuasive techniques, irony, themes in Native American literature and film
  

2nd 6 weeks: Puritan Influence, Declarations, and Transcendentalism

• 1st 3 weeks: Puritan Influence, Declaration of Independence, tone, simile, imagery, beginning grammar
  
• 2nd 3 weeks: Transcendentalism: Dickinson, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson
  

3rd 6 weeks: The Great Gatsby and the American Dream

• reading a novel, identifying themes, composing thematic statements, symbolism, using embedded quotes
  

4th 6 weeks: The American Essay

• non-fiction, personal essays, essays which discuss events, time periods
  

5th 6 weeks: Harlem Renaissance and the Red Scare

• The Crucible
  

6th 6 weeks: Fahrenheit 451 and our American Future

At this point I haven't even begun to consider grammar and writing, except for the completed 1st 6 weeks' plan, and the beginning of the 2nd six weeks. I know that my students will need to complete 1 research paper, and a minimum of 1 essay to prepare them for the state test. One of my goals is to develop writing assignments in which students carefully analyze literature in various different ways: how word choice affects tone, elements of characterization, etc.

Okay Ms. Q. You're up!