This is a hard pill to swallow, because I wasn’t half bad as a teacher. Upon deeper reflection, I’m not confident that any of my students learned anything of lasting value from at least half the lessons I taught. I taught that book a few times, and even though I looked forward to it every time, I always finished the unit a little unsatisfied.Īnd it’s only now, years later, that I’m starting to understand that dissatisfaction: I can’t say with any confidence that my students actually learned something from that unit. Maybe it was the connections I was able to make to the stuff students dealt with on a day-to-day basis. Maybe it was just the idea of teaching it that I loved. I mean, even though I loved the book, my students’ response to it was mostly lukewarm. In retrospect, I’m not sure why it was my favorite. From start to finish, the whole unit took about three weeks.

And I got to drool over Matt Dillon in the movie’s opening scene again and again and again. I checked students’ progress with occasional quizzes, we did some work on plot and characters, setting and theme, and then, after a unit test over the whole book-containing mostly questions that asked students to identify characters, setting, and key plot points-we spent nearly three class periods watching Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version of the book. Predictably, some fell behind in the book like they did with all assigned reading. Some students became as absorbed in the novel as I’d hoped they would others, not so much. Some chapters we did in class (I would read to them, then they would read silently), and others at home. After we did some reflecting, writing, and talking, we were ready to start the book.

Every year, we began the unit with a discussion about the cliques that formed in students’ lives, how these groups interacted, the unwritten rules that governed their behavior, and what happened when groups clashed or people formed relationships across group lines.

When I taught seventh grade language arts, one of my favorite things to teach was S.E. When you make a purchase through these links,Ĭult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.

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