Literature Woes
I love literature, and I wish I was better at sharing this love with my students. When we are reading a story though, and a student wants to share a comment, I always end up trying to rush them along. Why? Because the moment they start sharing, the rest of the class starts tuning them out and talking to each other. This aggravates me to no end. Often, when I want to add a comment of my own, they will not listen to me, but will instead talk to each other.
I know I could improve my classroom management marginally, but I honestly do not think my students are truly capable of behaving in a way that is conducive to meaningful discussion of literature. This sounds defeatist, mostly because it is. I still try my best for all of them to get something out of the lesson, and in my smaller English III class this is working great. But in my bigger classes, like my 30 person English I class, there are just too many side conversations to squelch. I think English classes work best when they are small. Just a thought.
I know I could improve my classroom management marginally, but I honestly do not think my students are truly capable of behaving in a way that is conducive to meaningful discussion of literature. This sounds defeatist, mostly because it is. I still try my best for all of them to get something out of the lesson, and in my smaller English III class this is working great. But in my bigger classes, like my 30 person English I class, there are just too many side conversations to squelch. I think English classes work best when they are small. Just a thought.
posted by Joel Hebert at 6:12 PM
1 Comments:
I wrote this blog after a bad day. There is a grain of truth in there so I'm going to leave it up. I do think all my students can learn from our literature: in fact, I know they are learning. It's just frustrating to have side conversations going on when I am discussing something that I care about tremendously.
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