Video

Below you will find two videos of the portfolio readings that students were required to present. Both students represent successes for me, since both had a fear of presenting in class.

Student #1

Student #2

 

Unit Reflection

Students were quite successful in addressing the major learning goals this unit. Overall, the class asserted myriad deep ideas and intellectual comments, and all students had opportunities to participate, argue, defend, and express. I am not able to say with certainty whether or not students understand naturalism as a literary style. We ran out of time to really dive into this in the final portfolio assessments. That said I feel as though our time was spent well, particularly in the first and third week. I also do not feel that students really made a connection between Dust Bowl era conditions and Of Mice and Men. Again, in reflection, I think this learning goal was less fundamental. The setting mattered less than I thought that it would, with the characters and their conflicts really giving us enough to talk about. We were able to talk about foreshadowing, dialogue, dialect, theme, and characters. Our time spent on language was very fruitful, including the addition of a dialect log that we used while conducting close readings in class. One student referred to the language in Of Mice and Men as sounding “like a Southern accent with a touch of the Bronx.” We also brought in our Scottish brogue when reading “To a Mouse,” when we worked more consciously in the act of translating difficult dialect-based texts.

Regarding the final portfolio and what it was able to accomplish, students indeed showed that they could construct pieces of writing that took many forms and styles. The “Response” papers, which were based on “Friendship in an Age of Economics,” were insightful. Students spent a day reading the article and constructing a rough draft where they needed to apply the main ideas to the novella. Then, students conducted peer revision before writing their final drafts. This response paper became the analytic component to the portfolio. The “Diary Entry” component of the portfolio was well-done by most students. They wrote with the dialect we had been talking about to empathize with a character from the text. Students wrote as Lennie, George, Curley’s wife, and others. Students talked about identity crises, conflicts in friendships, and rationale for George’s act. The third and final component of the portfolio was the “Free Choice,” and my list perhaps proved overwhelming. Most students opted for the drawing and artist’s statement (though many forgot the statement portion). A few wrote a memoir relating to the story, a couple wrote an alternate ending (Lennie doesn’t actually die!), and one student wrote a ten-page screenplay adaptation. All in all, students submitted quality work—definitely the highest quality that they have shown this year—and with our most challenging book to this point.

One area of mixed success and frustration was our work to increase opportunities for class conversation. Students were highly resistant to the idea of dialogue circles, and after several challenging attempts where students often talked over one another, we moved away from this method. Instead, we spent the third and fourth week going back to the roots of what worked for us in earlier weeks. Students had some of their most powerful, poignant, and persuasive conversations in these last couple weeks. We had friendly debates about whether Curley’s wife’s death was deserved, and about whether George should have killed Lennie. Some students felt that Lennie was better off dead, while others said he should be in prison or left alone.

I was most impressed by students’ abilities to move fluidly between their writing and speaking skills. We conducted daily writing in various forms—starters, short responses, rough drafts of essays—and shared our responses aloud. Students showed that they could take challenging ideas and turn them into a final portfolio. I saw a lot of success in students expressing their ideas in writing and in speaking aloud.

As far as I can tell, students were keeping up with reading. They enjoyed the story, even if they did not all approve of the ending. In anticipation of reading-as-homework being a difficult lift (something I read about in former MAT reflections) I purposely designed lessons that would allow for some daily reading. This had the advantage of ensuring that everyone was at least aware of main ideas and major scenes/characters. The only challenge with this method was that it left us less time each day for activities. Even so, I feel comfortable with the time devoted to reading in class, since the majority of students proved that they understood what was going on. I can cite the 90% completion rate for the final portfolio as well as the more qualitative conversations in class.

Conversations about power were more implicit than what I had planned for, but we were still able to talk about power in friendship. One conversation that we had after Lennie kills Curley’s wife gave the class ample opportunity to discuss how Lennie and Curley’s wife had a power-reversal. That is, students brought up how if the scene with Crooks’ bunkhouse, Curley’s wife had “all the power.” When Lennie chokes Curley’s wife, he uses his physical power to overwhelm her. Students were mixed on how they felt about her death, some saying she deserved it and others saying Lennie was a brut.