I want to start off by apologizing for my lack of posts recently. The week prior to spring break came with essays to write and exams to cram for. But, I'm back now with a decent amount of sleep and new material to cover. I also recently began fieldwork for this semester. Here's a look at my first day, and the observations I made of my cooperating teacher running his classroom without technology.
I am doing my fieldwork observations at one of the local high schools near my college campus in Stockton, and I observe two periods of Freshman Honors English twice a week. For purposes of confidentiality, I won't mention the name of the school site or names of students, and I'll refer to my cooperating teacher as Mr. B. My first day of fieldwork was a minimum day, so I only got to see an abbreviated day in the classroom, but two activities Mr. B facilitated were a literary terms quiz, and an introduction to No Fear Shakespeare. Neither of these activities required technology.
Literary Terms Quiz
Mr. B spent the majority of the class period giving his students a pop quiz on literary terms. These aren't vocabulary words, but terms that specific to literature that students need to master for the class. He gives the quiz once a week, changing up the terms every so often depending on students' scores, and asks questions such as: name two of the three types of irony (verbal, situational, dramatic).
I particularly took note on Mr. B's procedure for his quizzes. It's so easy now for teachers to use Scantrons for tests and quizzes and have them automatically graded in seconds, but what I liked about Mr. B's quiz procedure is that it avoids technology all together.
Students had to write their responses on paper, and were able to ask for questions to be repeated during the quiz. Mr. B also gave students clues to help them on tricky questions. When finished, students switched their papers with somebody next to them, and Mr. B read the correct answers aloud and explained them. If students' answers were close to the correct answer, or Mr. B could tell they had the right idea, they were given credit. This was my favorite aspect of the quiz procedure. I liked it because students gained more understanding by discussing answers as a class, and that type of communication is lost with an automatic grading mechanism.
The second activity Mr. B did with his class on my first day of fieldwork was introducing the students to No Fear Shakespeare texts.
No Fear Shakespeare
The No Fear Shakespeare series is a publication by SparkNotes, which is a popular website students use to access chapter summaries, character lists, and plot synopses of popular novels. No Fear Shakespeare gives students the original Shakespeare text and a modern interpretation of it side by side. Mr. B encouraged his students to purchase a copy of Romeo and Juliet in this form for their upcoming quarter, when they'll be reading the play. Even though the entire play is in their textbooks, Mr. B expressed that having the No Fear Shakespeare text would put them ahead and give them a better understanding of Middle English-a language that's 400 years old.
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