I am currently working on my lesson plans for my 5-7 day unit, during which I will be covering William Faulkner's classic, "A Rose for Emily." I am very excited; this is one of my favorite short stories!
To accompany the reading and evaluate my students' understanding, I am also planning a brief persuasive essay. The students will be expected to convince their audience of Emily's guilt or innocence by giving supporting evidence from the text. If I feel that there is time, I may need to cover some basic MLA citations and formatting rules. This is something I am a little worried about since I am unsure of how familiar they are with citing. I feel like this is something that can get extremely confusing, so I'm looking for a very simple overview of MLA that will cover the necessary basics.
In my searching, though, I found a neat little website: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/storymap/index.html, which allows students to do story mapping online, then print out all of their notes. Depending on the story, or the topic covered that day, students can do up to 4 different story maps. Each one comes with prompts and the whole thing is just more interactive than a worksheet, which is becoming more and more necessary for effective teaching nowadays. I do think that it may be much too elementary for some classes, though.
On a side note, my pre-student teaching is going fairly well. My goal of late seems to be to eliminate the cheating that half of the class partakes in whenever they get handed a worksheet. I've had several discussions with students about the value of doing their own work. It is difficult to tell sometimes if I've actually made an impact when I discuss the ramifications of cheating with them, though. Usually, it is clear once the next worksheet is handed out...
I love that short story as well! I really like the persuasive essay choices that you are going to give them, very creative. I think it will be really interesting to see what they come up with.
ReplyDeleteGood luck to you on monitoring the cheating. Your CT is lucky to have you in her classroom. Cheating is a big concern for today's students, I think in part because they have been schooled to "work together". I know that cheating is a topic teachers talk about, but there aren't a lot of practical suggestions. In the past couple of years, there have been reports of significant cheating problems in some prominent school districts, including cheating by the teachers and administrators. Washington, D.C., Atlanta and San Francisco were some of the cheating scandal headliners. However, I've only read reports of student and administration cheating with startling statistics, but nothing that offers practical solutions to the problem. The "culture of cheating", as I read in one article in the LA Times, is a culture that comes from home, when parents over-emphasize grades and under-emphasize learning and skills development. It's sad, isn't it? Using common sense, there are things the teacher can do to curb cheating, but it would be great to have research to guide us in determining the best ways to reduce cheating among our students. I haven't found any - have you?
ReplyDeleteYour unit sounds like it will be excellent. I love the idea of writing a persuasive essay based on Emily's guilt or innocence. I'm sure it will go very well, because people love giving their opinions. Those should be some very interesting papers to read! I'm definitely going to have to check out that website as well, because it sounds like the resources there would be extremely helpful. I'm always looking for new ways to complete lessons and help students, because the typical way of writing notes and completing worksheets can get boring.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry that you're having issues with cheating in your classroom. That can be very frustrating. I think it's great that you've had discussions with your students about the value of doing their own work. While it may not always seem like it, I'm sure that helped to some extent. The only thing I have found helps deter cheating is giving worksheets with different questions on certain sheets, or designing assignments that require a more personalized response. However, sometimes worksheets are necessary, and all you can do is try your best to deter students from copying their answers from their peers. If you find anything that seems to work let me know!