Summer school experiments

Hello everyone,

In my most recent emails, I've been thinking in print about how I'm going to plan my upcoming summer school assignment at Lincoln High School and my regular school assignment at Wilson High School.

Summer school ("intersession" at Garfield) has always been a good time for me to experiment. The course is quick; there is flexibility in time (it's a two-hour block); the students are docile; the atmosphere is more relaxed. Over the years, I've worked my way to the philosophy that summer school needs to be a regular semester, but accelerated; it should not be noticeably easier than the normal semester; it's just leaner in terms of number of activities and assessments and the opportunity to reteach.

It allows a teacher to try a new method of pedagogy or management and see immediate, raw results.

I'm thinking I want to try a different sort of overview in my class this summer.

I always do an overview of what students should expect in the semester; I will keep that. I was thinking more of an overview of the English language. If students understand a little better where English comes from, they might understand better the levels of formality, diction, syntax, tone, spelling, and rhetoric that the California Standards require of them.

Those are things that I used to reserve for my AP class, but I think there's no reason why a regular 10th grade class can't have them. Give the overview, then work on the meaning and examples through the rest of the six weeks. Give them the foundation, and they can better build on it.

I will be working with an unfamiliar textbook, but I can't really experiment with that too profitably because Wilson uses a different text, and I will be teaching different classes. But I can experiment with new ways to use the text for the regular thematic progressions I prefer to organize around: words to phrases to clauses to sentences to paragraphs to essays to research papers; non-fiction to poetry to short fiction to drama to Shakespeare to long fiction (I'm chronological in American lit.); unedited writing to draft writing to edited writing; informal to formal communication; persuasion to exposition to literary analysis.

I've discovered that the McDougall-Littell text has a lot of activities in the text that integrate grammar and writing with the literature. I don't think I can master it fast enough, but being aware of it will allow me to play around with it this summer.

Adapting to new textbooks is an essential part of the life of a teacher. Summer school's short times allow for that.

This will also let me see if I still have the chops to teach this stuff without chasing them all away. Let's hope so.

Jeff Combe