This most recent week was our first round of "interim" tests, which are supposed to be like benchmarks for the EOC. We've been working these past two weeks on an explanatory essay, which is essentially what part of the interim will ask them to do, so that has taken care of a lot of our prep time. I did run a couple mini-lesson openers about multiple choice strategies, but this should all be stuff that they hopefully learned in previous grades. After we took the test, I'm really glad that we didn't spend a ton of time preparing for it. A lot of kids tried to escape it by skipping class, or they clicked through the questions without much effort and took the rest of the period as free time. We'll have to see what the scores end up looking like, but I get the feeling that this test is really just measuring who cares about tests, rather than what actual content knowledge they have...
Working on an essay has definitely got me thinking more than the testing. We've been reading a ton of different speeches from people of many backgrounds and causes, using pretty much the same list as we did last semester when my mentor was leading. All of them are older, and picked out to represent "foundational" texts in American history. Personally, I find these very boring, and the kids do too, so I was really wondering why we had to do all this. Here's what the standard says that my mentor gave as justification for reading these:
ELAGSE11-12RI9: Analyze foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features. For British Literature, American Literature, and Multicultural Literature use comparable documents of historical significance.
Note that for American Lit, which we are teaching, we're given free rein to decide what documents we think are of "comparable significance"! So, why? I haven't gotten a better answer than 'this is what we've always done,' which I don't think is a valid justification at all. I did get us to cut a few of the pieces that bored our kids to death the most last semester, though, and I got to add in something that I thought was really fun! For one of these speech lessons, we read both the popularized version of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman" speech, as well as the less popularly read but more accurately transcribed version (you can read them side by side here). This seemed like such a great way to talk about how the transcriber's identity and intent makes such a difference in how and why they choose their words! Plus, I had a genuine question I was curious about: why exactly did the less accurate version get more popular??
Things didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped, especially because I had to run the lesson on a day when my mentor was out sick. I usually get to debrief with her between classes and talk about what I should tweak for the next period, so it was harder to see what was going wrong from the outside and fix it for this one. I wanted to do a sort of mini-research project where table groups had to answer several different questions about the transcribers and try to make some inferences. I knew that I wasn't a total expert on this, and so I was hoping that letting them lead the exploration and teaching of each other would get them to buy in more, like Ripp was talking about in her book. This didn't really work out, probably because this was our first try at something this unstructured, and I had underestimated how much scaffolding they still needed. Because I hadn't given them any materials except the websites where the two texts were hosted, it seemed like nobody knew where to start. I was surprised that it didn't seem to occur to most of them that they should poke around the text's website itself! I'd assumed that they had experience with this in previous classes, but next time I'm going to clearly ask them if they have before we do anything ourselves.
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