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About Me
- Dr. Susan Ferguson
- I teach English Education, Foreign Language Education, and ESL Education, and I advise STEM Education Majors at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama--and I LOVE IT! I love to invite others to find the poet that is within them--I am certain a poet lies within each of us!
So this week I was out for two days on a field trip. We took the students for the Davidson Invitational Model United Nations competition and the kids had a blast. This is my second year working with the kids after school for this, although i used to staff USA's group and have been working with the national collegiate comps ever since. This, is the 6th year that MGM has participated and the first year that anyone has won an award. In fact, we won 2 awards and only had 10 students attend!!! Woo hoo!
ReplyDeleteI'm really proud of how well we did though and I think a lot of them will sign up to participate again next year. This is one of the fun after school activities that I really look forward to.
Melanie,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear that your students won some awards! How proud you must be. It's really cool that between teaching full time and taking a course at South, you still have time to spare for field trips and after school activities.
This week, Ursula and I took on the challenging task of teaching Julius Caesar to 10th graders at Leflore. I think we had them for most of the week, until I went over Act V with them on Friday. After Cassius committed suicide...and then his servant after him...and then Brutus after the servant, the students were not willing to suspend their disbelief any longer. We had a few laughs because when you think about it, it is kind of silly. I still have, "This is so stupid! Why are they killin' theyselves!?!" ringing in my head. Oh well, the students seem to be having lots of fun and I'm having so much fun teaching them!
Another thing I thought was pretty cool was the assignment our cooperating teacher gave them. She divided the class into partners, and each partner had to choose one of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories to read. They then had to make a T-shirt representing their respective short story, yielding results such as the "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" shirt; a gruesome little number with fake blood around the neckline on the front and a macabre head rolling down the back side of the T-shirt.
Paige
Paige,
ReplyDeleteThe T-shirt activity sounds like a lot of fun! We finished up our unit on Poe this week, and it was the most engaged and responsive I've ever seen these students. After reading "Annabel Lee" and "A Dream Within a Dream," I wrote a sentence/line on two separate pieces of paper and had each student write at least one sentence/line that used a literary device we encountered during Poe's stories/poems. The students enjoyed it and came up with crazy stories and poems. Once finished, my cooperating teacher laminated them and posted them onto the bulletin board. You may want to try this with your students because mine seemed to enjoy it! Oh yeah, the idea for this activity must be attributed to Mrs. Piper; she also had great results with the activity.
Hi guys,
ReplyDeleteMy students read and watched Julius Caesar this week, and worked on grammar. I'm glad your kids are having fun with Julius Caesar. The students in my class told me they still have no clue what it is about, that it is stupid, that they don't speak "that" language, and they read out-loud but have no idea what they are saying. Of course, all this is said to me out of earshot of the teacher.
Oh, guys, Julius Caesar is my favorite thing to teach tenth graders! I realized during my internship that I had to have a purpose for them to really get "into" the play, so we approached the whole thing from the angle of "somebody has a big head and needs to be put in their place." Since the students think they cannot read Shakespeare because it's "old English" (which really baffles them when I explain how it really isn't that old compared to Beowulf), I pull out a really great activity that I learned when I was an undergrad. Split students into groups and assign them a particular scene from the Act you are reading. Then assign the students the task of rewriting their scene to fit a particular time period or stereotype. My professor made my friends and I had to turn a scene from Romeo and Juliet into a "redneck" version. It was crazy fun and funny. If your students still don't understand it, then they're trying NOT to understand it.
ReplyDeletePaige and I started a fresh week in another teacher’s class. Lucky to say this teacher happens to be my 8th grade teacher. Monday I taught a lesson on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and Annabel Lee. I had a lot of fun since these are all 10th graders. They seemed to be very eager to learn we were going to be teaching them for a few days. My first day teaching went smooth. Wednesday I had to come back to teach Act I & II of Julius Caesar. At first I was skeptical, but after taking a day to sort through what I really wanted them to do I was fine. I was surprised at the amount of participation from the students. I included a reading strategy similar to questioning the author on quotations from the play. They seemed to have enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteThe question came up about whether students should be learning or taught Julius Caesar. I would like to pose this question to the class; do you all think students should learn this, whether they are in private, public or parochial schools? Please respond briefly to this so that I may have a clear understanding of what my esteemed colleague was trying to enlighten on.
Every student should at least be exposed to each genre of Shakespeare's plays. Ceaser is one of the great history plays. Students need to at least see and read these to become culture American citizens. I answer this question each year when I do Romeo and Juliet or some other Shakespear play.
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