How Do You Teach?

Iza left a comment asking me to share how I teach - I do need the clarify that while I am an "English teacher", I don't really teach the language of english. We do have vocabulary related to text, but for the most part teaching of how to speak english is very informal.

In teaching how to analyze literature or proper writing technique, I would have to describe my teaching methods as slow and methodical. At least for my regular education courses. By slow, I mean that every concept is broken down piecemeal. For example, during the first week of school my students will read a short story by Ray Bradbury. The first day, we will focus on "pre-reading" strategies. The beginning of the story handout has a bunch of information about the story - background information on the author, information about setting and tone, a list of words and definitions that may be unfamiliar to the reader, etc. Going through all this information and figuring out what to do with it will take a class period . This is because American students are incapable of remembering information from one year to the next or even one week to next - so they claim. Most will claim to have never heard the word "setting" before in school. Some clown will say that "setting" is what you do when you're finished with your beer... "you be setting it down on the table". Also, "bradbury is gay, the story is gay, this class is gay and so is the teacher." We may get into annotating, but that is pretty much dependent upon how popular the clown is.

We'll read the story the next day.

I'll really have to ponder on how I teach my AP classes, because, to be honest, I don't know. Sometimes I really think that the students learn in spite of me, rather than because of me... I just guide them to some really good resources and they take it from there. It's something I'll be working on this year - especially in my new AP Literature course.