4/30/2007

A glorious, glorious Monday!

That’s what I said to myself this morning at 5:35 when my alarm went off. I can’t even tell you how much I love to wake up each morning and realize that a brand new day, full of possibility and wonder, lies ahead.

No, seriously. I can’t tell you. Please stop asking. Moving on…

Today we finished of the first acts of Othello and Hamlet, respectively. I’m finding some pretty intense connections between these two plays that I hadn’t thought about before, and I’m really learning a lot from teaching this semester. I guess that’s a good thing, but one might legitimately wonder, If the the teacher’s learning, who’s teaching the students? Yeah, it’s a “Who will watch the watchers” kind of thing, if you really think about it. Or maybe it’s more of “If a tree falls in the forest” type of thing.” No, that’s not it, either.

Ahem. A few notes:

Hamlet
Act 1 establishes the major themes of the play. Hm. I don’t like the word “themes” for Hamlet. It’s not like anybody really knows what exactly this play is about. Unless you say it’s about “mystery,” or “ambiguity,” or “unknowingness.” Those are all just fancy ways to say we don’t know exactly what Shakespeare meant, and we like it that way.

This “theme” is introduced in the very first line of the play, when a sentry asks “Who’s there?” This is a recurring question throughout the play, and the various answers to this question–whether we’re talking about a ghostly apparition or a shriek from behind a curtain–are always crucial.

Another “themish” thing that kicks off in Act 1 is the idea of Deception. (Or is it Deceit? I’m going with Deception.) We spent some time talking specifically about Polonius’ big speech in Act 1 scene 3. A lot of people over the years have quoted from this speech in giving advice to young people about how to live.( Polonius himself is advising his own young son, Laertes, about how to conduct himself when he goes back to school in France.) But here’s the rub: I think Polonius’ advice is ambiguous at best, and possibly even an outright lesson in how to deceive. I’m not going to expound upon the details here, but go back and look at the speech and see how many times he advises Laertes to manipulate and use the “truth” to the advantage of his “own self.”

Othello
Act 1 of Othello isn’t quite the explosive roller coaster ride that Hamlet is, but it’s pretty great in its own way. The main point of interest in today’s reading was our introduction to Shakespeare’s arch villain, Iago. Iago has two speeches in act one in which he explains his view of life and other humans. Basically, it boils down to the fact that Iago is a cynic who believes that, ultimately, he and every other human is out to promote only their own welfare. (See the nice connection to Polonius there–”to thine own self be true” and all that”?) Because of this outlook, Iago doesn’t care what he does to other people as long as he gets what he wants. And what he wants is a promotion that someone else–Othello’s old buddy Cassio–already got. Iago is such a great character because he’s smart, and also totally aware of the consequences of his actions, yet he finds reasons to justify what he does. Even in the first day of reading, we’ve already started a few discussions in class about why Iago does what he does, and how his actions illuminate things we see in our own lives.

We also discussed the idea of “foils” in Shakespeare. In literature, a foil is a character that the reader is mean to compare with another character–to compare and contrast the actions, attitude, and outcomes of the two people. I suggested today that Iago is a foil for Othello in that they are opposites in almost any way you can think of. More on this another day, but I just wanted to get everyone started thinking about this

For those of you reading Othello, after the reading and discussion, we took the rest of class to do our first speech translation. The worksheet (with complete instructions) is available for download, below.

Toodeloo.

MT

Download: Iago speech translation–9th grade assignment

4/27/2007

.org

As a teacher, that’s the most important thing I’ll ever tell you: “.org”. Here’s the thing: If you worked for the past two weeks, and all this weekend, on your big, important PowerPoint presentation that is due by Sunday night, and you slaved and toiled over this thing for countless hours, adding animation after professional-looking animation, hundreds of MS Office cliparts, and a veritable symphony of PowerPoint sound effects, and then you happened to send it to matt@easthollywood.com, it would all be for nothing, because, for all any of us know, easthollywood.com is the domain of a locally-owned and operated video store in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Here at this school, we are above such commercial ventures: We teach and learn for the love of such noble pursuits; we are a charitable organization very much against profit. And therefore my address is

matt@easthollywood.org

Anyway, we had class today, and what a class it was. First, we read and enjoyed most of the sonnets produced in yesterday’s class. They were delightful, and many were incredibly stupid, such as this little piece of Shakespearean-ness:

Bubble Gum

I love bubble gum

oh so very much

gum is so fun

bubble gum ‘n’ such

gum is so chewy

oh so bubbily

bubbles, you can blow them

without any troubly

chewing gum until the end

i love gum as much as hula-hoops

and yo-yo’s and rainbows

and ice-cream scoops.

bubblegum is so yummily

in my silly tummily

 

Incidentally, this author was the same student who penned the instant classic short story “Mystery Meat,” which featured a jailed protagonist reminiscing on the past while snacking on him/herself. I think the thematic connections are more than clear.

Anyway, after that, we put on a “dumb show” of the first act of the play (Hamlet for 10th graders; Othello for ninth). The dumb show consisted of me introducing each character, someone volunteering to “play” them in front of the class, and then that student posing as their character in a sort of cast “portrait” of all the characters. This little mise-en-scene activity helped reveal how each character was related to the others, what their motivations were, and something about their main personality traits. After the “group portrait” I read a synopsis of each scene, and the students silently acted out the action. There was a lot of arm-waving and lip-flapping, but, strangely, no sound. It was dumb. So to speak.

Then, we listened to Act 1 while following along with the book. More on what we heard on Monday.

If you weren’t in class today, obtain a copy of the play (or follow the link to the Complete Works of William Shakespeare over there on the right side of the page) and read act 1–Hamlet for 10th-graders, Othello for 9th.

Ta, now.

MT

4/26/2007

Why was I in such a good mood today? First of all, I had a splitting headache for most of the day, which, while it doesn’t normally fill my heart with joy, does often cause the left side of my mouth to curl up in a painful grimace that could be mistaken for a smile. That was nice.

But I did have good reason to smile today since today we began reading Shakespeare. We weren’t quite ready for the Shakespeare feast that is Hamlet and Othello, but instead we started with a Shakespeare aperitif–an appetizer: We learned how to read and enjoy Shakespearean sonnets.

Another thing that made me happy yesterday was that I finally got a projector in my class and was able to create my whole lecture in PowerPoint, which means, if you want to learn what we learned in class, you’ll need to download the presentation listed below, go through the slides, complete the various activities, and hand it all in.

Now I need to go home and bang my head against a wall to make it hurt a little less. Joyyyy.

MT

Download: sonnet slides

4/25/2007

Let me explain myself.

I believe it was 4th period yesterday when, after asking the class for the 4th time to get up and arrange themselves in groups only to be met with vacant stares and absolutely no movement whatsoever, I started re-arranging students myself. If they weren’t going to move, well, hell, I was going to move them. To be precise, I moved their desks, the ones they happened to be sitting in–I did not violate my policy of never having any kind of physical contact whatsoever with a “client.”

Anyway, in the course of this vigorous activity, I did happen to grasp one empty desk and overturn it, which produced a series of somewhat alarming thuds. For these thuds, and the psychological alarm they caused, I sincerely apologize. In fact yesterday, a few minutes after the accident happened, I felt so bad that I undertook a self-assigned penance.

And that is why the entire 4th period class witnessed me traveling from group to group for a half-hour, monitoring and participating in group discussions–with a large desk born awkwardly and painfully atop my be-stooped back.

You see, it’s perfectly reasonable, the things we public school teachers do to stay mentally stable and relatively clean of conscience.

So today in class I think I conducted myself in an exemplary fashion, and that is because we were involved in a truly righteous pursuit, the study of Shakespeare. We started out today by letting students summarize, comment on, and question the articles we read yesterday. These articles discussed a wide array of topics: the prevailing scientific and religious thought of Shakespeare’s day; details about the Globe theater and what it was like to go there; speculations about Shakespeare’s identity, religion, and private life; and the debate about whether or not to “modernize” Shakespearean language to make it more accessible to more people. Students read and “taught” these articles to each other yesterday, and today we just discussed any lingering questions and curiosities that came up.

Overall, it seems like we kept coming back to the idea that Shakespeare is so special because of the way he breaks down barriers between things we consider “opposite.” For example, he broke down the distinction between comedy and tragedy by giving audiences a time to laugh, even in the midst of the most bitter tragedy. He broke down the idea of two “opposite” genders by consistently confusing the gender identities of characters in his plays. This gender-related confusion was even stronger considering that in several of Shakespeare’s plays, female characters, who were portrayed by young male actors, disguised themselves as males. I wonder what kind of costume and make-up that double-disguise required?

After considering all this, I showed a clip from the end of the film Shakespeare in Love. This film shows a rather accurate portrayal of a Globe-like theater, an Elizabethan audience, and Queen Elizabeth, although I made clear to the class that the plot of this film is a total Hollywood-style fabrication, as well as the fact that Shakespeare wasn’t as “sexy” as Joseph Fiennes. In the film clip, we see Shakespeare and his company putting on the first production of Romeo and Juliet, much as it must have appeared back in the proverbial day. I also really like how the Hollywood story imposed on the historical fact does help us understand the depth of emotion contained in Shakespeare’s words. (This film was also co-written by Tom Stoppard, a great fan of the bard, and considered by some to be the greatest living playwright. It’s kind of cool to see what the greatest living playwright has to say about the greatest dead one.)

So now I think we’re ready to start reading the bard’s actual words. Tomorrow we’ll read and “decode” some sonnets in preparation for starting the plays themselves on Friday.

Ta.

MT

No downloads.

4/24/2007

In all of my excitement yesterday about school and learning stuff, I forgot to mention the fact that yesterday was William Shakespeare’s death day. I’m really sorry I forgot to mention it, we could have…celebrated…or something.

Anyway, it’s a good thing that today’s class was dedicated to learning everything we could about Shakespeare in a one hour period, because otherwise I never would have known. It’s not like I read the articles I assign my students to read in class–that would be so…ordinary.

Okay, I do read the articles I assign, but I haven’t read any of these articles since last semester when I updated them, which means I have no idea what they say. I have a weird memory that way. The only way I can possibly keep track of everything I need to do in the next five minutes is to forget everything else. Well, it’s not exactly forgetting–I mean, all the info’s in my head somewhere, because it comes out sometimes when I’m not trying to remember it. But that’s another story. Today was all about Shakespeare.

Let me take a paragraph or two here to muse about the mysteries and enigmas and shrouds of the unknown and hazes of ambiguity and veils of indefinableness and mantles of unspecificity, etc., that surround this man, William Shakespeare. If he was a real man . . .

Okay, Shakespeare was a real guy, let it be known. So we don’t have any of his plays written in his hand, big deal. So our version of the plays are probably second hand transcripts of third hand texts pirated from noisy performances by illiterate groundlings…. So what? Despite all of the transcription and translation that has occurred, there is still something totally unique and identifiable about the writings we call “Shakespeare.” In short, Shakespeare is as real or realer than anything I can think of in the contemporary world.

Today in class, I distributed 5 different articles concerning Shakespeare’s life and times. Students read and summarized the articles on their own, and then each student became a “traveling teacher,” joining up with a group made up of students who had all read different articles. Students shared their summaries, pointed out important and interesting tidbits, and generally examined the mysterious, enigmatic, undefinable, etc., etc., author.

If you missed class this day, download the worksheet below, and then come get copies of the articles from me. The password (that will convince me to lend you the aricles) is swordfish.

That’s as far as we got today. Tomorrow we’ll discuss major points together as a class, talk a little about theatre, and try to work our way through a small piece of Shakespearean English, in the form of a sonnet.

Until then, huz-zah!

MT

Download: Article summary worksheet

4/23/2007

Old geezers. Why won’t they just leave us alone?

I’m speaking, of course, of the the aged ladies and gentleman of the Modern Language Association.

Okay, no, I don’t actually know the average age of the typical Modern Language Association crony, but age isn’t about years, it’s a state of mind. That’s what old people always say. And old people are always right. The petty demands of the MLA could only be the product of truly ancient minds.

But old people are always right, which is why we must learn MLA standard formatting for all of our literature-related documents.

The current project we’re working on–our presentations about villains and ghosts–will draw from a few different sources that will need references, so it is time to ramp up our mad MLA skillz. Since this is not a formal research paper, but rather wil be deployed as a PowerPoint presentation, there are a few things we’ll do differently. For one thing, we won’t do in-text citations (that’s when you put in parentheses with an author’s name and a page number following a quote), and we won’t do a Works Cited page at the end of the presentation. Generally, when working in PowerPoint, a quote from a source such as a scholarly journal or a website will stand on a slide alone, and the complete reference information should appear right on that slide. You can see an example of how that should look if you download the sample slides from Friday’s post. The reference is generally placed at the bottom of the page in a smaller font. This is the one part of the slide that can sometimes violate the “no smaller than 24″ font-size rule.

In order to format references correctly, in the past it has been necessary to consult massive manuals, such as the MLA Handbook, which required you to locate instructions for the exact type of publication you were referencing. For some kinds of oddball references, it is still necessary to look it up and verify the form, but for most things today, most people let technology do the work for them so they can concentrate on the more substantial work of researching, coming up with ideas, and writing. The best citation and reference “machine” I’ve found is the Citation Machine. This program covers all your basic journals, magazines, books, and websites, and will convert to MLA and APA. We’ll do a little more in class tomorrow to get to know the parts of a complete reference, but if you have a basic knowledge of what should be there and how it should look this automated reference creator will help you out a lot.

If you weren’t here today, download the handout at the bottom of the post. Don’t forget that presentations begin on Friday, and you’ll need to get me your presentation before then.

Ciao.

MT

Download: Introduction to MLA format references

4/20/2007

Today we went to the computer lab to get started creating PowerPoint slides and continuing research on Villains and Ghosts (villains for 9th graders, ghosts for 10th). Before we left, I answered lingering questions about the scope and nature of the assignment, and I also provided a few sample slides so all y’all could take a look at what kind of information you might want to put up on these slides. The sample slide file is available for download below. If you don’t know what assignment I’m talking about, go back over last week’s posts to find out, and download the assignment packet from the post on 4/17.

A good weekend to you all, and until next week,

MT

Download: sample slides

4/19/2007

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about cakes. Urinal cakes, to be specific.

You see, our school facility here is constantly being upgraded and improved, and a few weeks ago the men’s bathroom was augmented by the addition of these curiously sudsy pucks. (Eww.) There’s something fascinating about the cakes–their color, the way they shrink, everso slowly, down to nothingness, and especially the urinal cake “holster” that holds them in place. I suppose I’m so fascinated by the holster because it’s impossible not to think, whenever you look at it, about what it would be like to have to change the cake. Our holsters are little rubber “cages” that contain the cake, founded on three flexible “feet” that extend into the nether-regions of the receptacle and hold the cake in the perfect center of the drain. This is incredibly important, considering that it is the draining action which causes water to lav the cake and release its aromatic splendor.

Now, you may think that all of this talk is overblown, sensless, perhaps even crude. But I would just like to point out that if you could somehow, right now, right this moment, experience a before-and-after (cake) smell test of this school’s private young men’s sanitary facilities, you would be as enthusiastic as I am about these fragrant pink pucks.

And thus concludes the dumbest thing I have ever written in full view of the public.

Today’s lecture on the basics of visual design in PowerPoint is presented to you as a downloadable file in…wait for it…PowerPoint! Click on the download below to access the file. Read it, and enjoy. If you like, you can pick up an abbreviated handout with the the most important instructions you’ll probably need as you create your own slide shows this week.

All hail the cake!

MT

Download: “Basics of PowerPoint Design” lesson

4/18/2007

Today our class was pleased to have the special treat of enjoying the fine instruction of our wonderful librarian, Meridene Lindsey. Meridene gave us a crash course on research, all of which you need to know in order to complete our current assignment. Basically, it all boils down to following:

• To find articles from traditional print sources (magazines, journals, newspapers) online, log on to the Pioneer Online Library , use the username and password she gave us (ask me if you forgot), and select the part of the library for K-12 Students. Once there, you’ll have the choice of several different databases. (A database is just a collection of articles. Most databases are limited by publication types or subject matter.) The two databases you’ll be most interested in are EBSCO and SIRS. Both of these databases have good keyword search functions. So (ghost-story people) if, for example, you’re looking for an article about why people tend to see dead family members, you could type in the words “family ghost” or something like that and you could pull up a bunch of relevant articles.
• Websites can also be good sources of information, but much more scrutiny is required to determine whether or not the site is credible. Meridene pointed out the importance of the URL (is it a .edu or .org address, most of which are more trustworthy than .com); and she told us to look for an author or sponsoring organization listed, whose credentials you could verify.
• Library websites are great places to find relevant books. The best way to find good books about your topic is to search by “subject.” Often, when you locate one book targeted to your subject, other books around it on the shelf will also be relevant.

So, that was the gist of it. I couldn’t hope to do true justice to Meridene’s wisdom and vim in delivering these remarks, but I would like to thank her for the fine instruction.

Students: Collect your interviews, then look over them and decide on a research focus. Friday will be a workday for you in the computer lab and you’ll be able to use all the techniques listed above to locate high-quality materials.

MT

No downloads.

4/17/2007

The Short Story Festival is over. Finally.

Reading around 70 students’ stories over the past few days has given me an interesting view of the future of fiction. In case there are any oldies (non-high school kids) out there reading this, perhaps you’ll be interested to know what kinds of paperbacks will be populating the shelves of the various nursing homes and transitional rehabilitation centers you’ll be inhabiting for the last decade or so of your lives.

First, I’m sorry to say that there’s going to be a lot of people eating people. Not all of the people-eaters will be crazed, or sub-human, or diseased. In fact, some of them will be pretty damned nice about it. Sometimes people will be forced to eat each other out of mercy and even romantic love! But, whatever their motivations, from the poetic to the culinary, tomorrow’s fiction will be about people who eat people. (And are thus the loneliest people…)

Also, the next generation will continue this generation’s literary gender stereotype wars. Musclebound, sandy-haired, deportively proficient young men will continue to be manipulative and controlling, while objectified young women will remain image-obsessed and passive. Most young ladies in tomorrow’s fiction will have no better option than suicide or drunken accidents, while young men will quickly get over it and move on (generally to the best friends of the recently departed). Occasionally, young men will die tragically and make ghostly visits to past lovers. These amorous specters will generally return from their private purgatories to visit their paramours in malls and other high-traffic retail locations. Love and and mental health and materialism are so deeply entwined in these stories. It turns out that the teenagers you see hanging out at the mall on Friday nights are actually going through most of their major, life-changing experiences right there in front of the Corn Dog Factory. Who knew?

Anyway. We had class. Today I introduced the next week’s worth of work, a small research assignment that will culminate in a presentation next Tuesday. 9th graders are examining the nature of evil, and examining the actions of an “evil” person they’ve had contact with. 10th graders are exploring the existence of ghosts, through academic research as well as personal interviews with witnesses to the paranormal. These topics tie in to the Shakespeare plays we’ll be reading, Othello and Hamlet. You can download the assignment packet below.

Today we undertook the first step of the process, which is to learn how to conduct a formal interview. An interview is different from a conversation, and these differences can be summed up by what I like to call The Three P’s of Interviews:

• Purpose: An interviewer sees the interviewee as a brain full of knowledge and memories that may be useful. The interviewer’s purpose is to extract the knowledge and memories relating to some specific topic.
• Plan: Unlike most conversations, interviewers should go into an interview with a solid plan, including several written questions, and possible follow-up questions and topics. Once the interview starts, the interviewer won’t know if something unique or interesting is being said unless they’ve thought about potential responses and topics beforehand.
• Product: If no record of the interview exists, then it’s like the interview never happened. Interviewers are responsible for taking accurate and detailed notes. Many interviewers also like to create an audio or audiovisual record of the interview.

After talking about all this, we went through an interview trial-run in class, using the worksheet you can download at the end of this post. Students first spent a few minutes planning the interview by considering the topic themselves and developing a few questions. Then we conducted the interviews. While the interviews were going on, students took notes and wrote down follow-up questions to clarify any confusions that arose or to add interesting details. Many interviewers found that their subjects were reluctant to spill their guts about the practice topic (“What is love?”), which is precisely why I chose this topic. These interviewers had to come up with a lot of creative follow-ups to get their interviewees to open up.

If you weren’t here today, get the assignment packet and the interview practice worksheet below and get started.

MT

Downloads:

9th grade reasearch packet

10th grade research project

Interview practice worksheet