I am trying a new idea with Julius Caesar. To preview the Act or Scene, and prevent reading difficulties, I am having groups work on interpreting passages into modern English before reading. For this lesson, I will give an overview of the scene before beginning this activity, so students know what events to expect during that scene.
For Act 3, Scene 1, there are six rather difficult, yet instrumental, passages. Each person in each group will get one of the six different passages and it will be their job to write a summary. For this particular activity, I am providing the modern text version to them as well (from No Fear Shakespeare.com), to aid in their interpretation.
Once every group member has written their summary, they will go in order the passages appear in the play to present their interpretation to their group. This way, each member of each group will encounter (hear) all six passages and have a better understanding of them. Reading scene 1 is thus a less daunting task. Since this is the scene Caesar is assassinated, we will watch it instead of listening to it.
For College Prep, I have been working on the Romantic Literature unit. One of their suggestions for the course when I took over at semester was to read novels. I have been developing a unit that will align with the textbook and curriculum but also with this student request.
Not to be disregarded, the point of reading a lot of short stories, poems or excerpts is so that students sample more texts before they leave. This way they have a wider breadth of knowledge to bring with them to college (they’ve heard of and read a lot of texts). The problem with this is the students get sick of such short segments, always reading from the textbook, and not diving into a longer text.
To rectify this dilemma, I have decided to jigsaw the authors presented in the textbook and to also read a manageable novel – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – as a class. I was going to have lit circles reading different novels, but the length, variety and number of texts available closed that door.
For the jigsaw, there are six authors in the textbook that students should encounter as an adult in society or a student going to college. These are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Keats and Lord Byron. Groups will be responsible for each author – biography, works, relevance to Romanticism. They will present their author to their classmates and read aloud samples from their Romantic literature. As far as the presentations go, I am hoping to plan this for an online posting on a wiki or in the SF moodle. Seeing as our computers and network were infected with the Valentine’s virus, I am not sure if I can get this set up in time.
Once the students have presented on their author, we can move on to reading Frankenstein. More on that to come later…
