Working
on this unit plan was quite challenging, a lot more challenging than the first.
My biggest issue is that I was doing it on a text that I hadn’t really read and
didn’t have in my possession every time I was thinking and making decisions
about where I wanted the unit to go.
I
chose to use A Raisin in the Sun and
although I’ve have watched the film, read some excerpts, and very familiar with
the context and themes of the play, at times I really needed to be able to flip
through the pages of the book as my ideas and thoughts were always changing. I
wonder if everyone else has read their unit texts entirely, or if that’s
something that needs to be done before embarking on the plan.
When I did have access to the text I was still developing my ideas, and
it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to structure the unit, and being
completely confident in my decision to use this play.
I
still had Ms. Derbyshire’s 5th period class in mind for this unit,
they’re the class I have seen the most, and I found it easier to construct this
unit around them and their personalities then to create an image of a possible
classroom in my head. I had watched them work on this play at the beginning of
this semester and I was already thinking about ways that I could do it
differently, so naturally, that was the first text that came to mind, so I
stuck with it.
I
got this idea of “Learning by Doing”; from an English professor at UF (Sid
Homan) where he had us act out scenes from the Shakespeare plays we worked on,
and I had a lot of fun with it. This says a lot because I have grown to be very
timid and introverted and I am not a huge fan of Shakespeare. This method
helped me most with comprehension and that is something I found that the
students struggled with when they read they play, so I hoped acting would help
them with that as well. I also thought that it would be fun for them, and I
think that this group would be a lot more open and comfortable with acting than
most 10th graders, so I think acting is a great way to make use of
their energy.
Jackie, interesting idea about "learning by doing." An old adage I'm fond of goes like this--"the things we have to learn to do, we have to do to learn"--something like that. I don't know who said it, but basically it just means you have to do whatever you're trying to learn to actually learn it.
ReplyDeleteDo you plan on "learning by doing" with A Raisin in the Sun? How would you do this? Would they act out parts of the play? Would individual students give soliloquies or speeches? I'm interested to hear more about how you would make this sort of thing happen.