This is the second entry in my mini-series (like I’m a TV show…) on my classes last semester. It’s as much for my benefit as yours (whoever you are out there, reading and not commenting.)
EDCI 463: Reading in Secondary Schools
I struggled to get through this class due to the volume of reading and the time slot. It was a late afternoon class, 3:30―4:20pm, so I was almost ready to fall asleep on the warmest afternoons. We started out with Weekly Reading Inventories due every class (Tuesdays and Thursdays). They were really just the professor’s way of making sure we’d done the reading. We only had to have three comments or questions, though, so a lot of the time, I stopped reading once I’d found my three comments. I had other things to do. Eventually, he realized that reading our WRI’s was more work than he wanted to do, so he threw out the assignment.
My classmates were from all different subject specialties, which made class interesting and awkward. There were about eight English majors, and our professor was an English teacher before he came back to grad school, so we dominated discussion most of the time. We had everything from math and physics to art and music majors. The non-English majors always had to push a little to come up with examples for their subjects. Who takes notes in music class?
Brendan was in that class with me, too. We had to team-teach one of the methods from our textbooks. We picked analogies, which we taught using a combination of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Bradbury references. I got nervous and sweaty like I always do when I have to speak in front of people, but I managed to get through it. I wasn’t alone, because half the grade was Brendan’s, too. I even managed to write on the chalkboard. I hate chalkboards. I have an obsession over clean hands that gets aggravated by chalk dust. I hope I get to teach in a room with whiteboards.
Our professor was actually kind of cool. He was young(ish), so he could relate to us. He managed the crucial step, though, of relating to us without trying to be our friend. We don’t need our teachers to be friends; we need them to be teachers. He connected especially well with Brendan, and since I always walked back toward South Campus with Brendan, I would chat with him a bit, too. He might have been a Christian as well, but since that never really came up in our discussions, I never knew for sure.
Our final project was a massive undertaking that took over my life. We had to choose a theme early in the semester for which we’d develop a two-week unit, including lesson plans for ten 45-minute classes. I came up with my theme right off the top of my head, based on a desire to teach The Time Machine: reactions to technology. We had to propose activities and such for our theme as the semester went on, so I didn’t have to do the whole thing in December, but I might as well have. I read The Time Machine, Feed, and “The Euphio Question” as my three texts for the unit. The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) and “The Euphio Question” (Ray Bradbury, Welcome to the Monkey House) were texts I’d read in high school, so I had the bonus of knowing they were already “appropriate” as well.
Feed, by M.T. Anderson, was such a good book. It’s set in the near future, but in a highly technological future world. Most people have feeds, which are computers implanted directly into the base of your skull and hooked into your brain. The feed is a combination of the information repository of the Internet and commercial advertising. If you want to know something, you can just look it up through the feed. If you walk into a store, the feed will suggest things you might want to buy. The book has one of my favorite first lines: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” It sucks because Titus and his friends are attacked by a hacker who scrambles their feeds, nearly killing them and a girl they meet named Violet. Violet is different from everyone else, as Titus learns, because she is willing to fight the feed. Part of the appeal of Feed, besides the fascinating concept of the feed itself, is Anderson’s style. The characters speak a futuristic slang that I had to pick up as I went: they purposely fry their own feed to “go mal” (malfunction), call their friends “units” and “unettes,” and go to School™ (because schools were bought out by corporations). They also curse like sailors, which didn’t bother me as much as you’d think. I chose it because I knew the basic plot and that it was on the syllabus for EDCI 466: Adolescent Literature (which I’m taking right now). I recommend it.
So, once I finally got all the books read, I had to come up with ten lesson plans. Ten. And they all had to fit in this fussy format our professor gave us. I worked on it all night before it was due. I even called out of work for the first time (and only time so far) so that I could try to finish it. The worst part is that I didn’t finish it on time. In my lack of foresight, I’d signed up for the first of several presentation dates. I went to class sleep-deprived and stressed-out to give my presentation. My classmates noticed my lethargy. I turned it in by the next class, though, just so I could feel like my marathon night hadn’t been a complete waste. And I did get an A in the class, so I suppose my less-than-perfect work was good enough.
And I have some good ideas for teaching reading to my future students. So it all worked out.
But I still hate pulling all-nighters.
