David Dean
Introduction
This unit is created for use in my English III and IV classes in a unique educational environment–Street School of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Street School was created in 1973 as an alternative school so students who have been underserved in traditional school settings could find success through learning that “plays to their strengths.” Street School, due to the therapeutic nature of our program and the unique needs of our students, instead of semesters has six-week sessions. Each student is assigned to two classes for each six-week session, each class meeting for a two-hour “block” and limited to thirteen students. In charge of each class is a teacher who, in addition to being a content specialist in a particular subject area, facilitates engaging and meaningful field trips to find connections between students’ areas of interest and the Oklahoma tested subjects: science, mathematics, history, writing, and reading. The focus is on finding strengths in each student and using those to leverage proficiency in areas in which students still need to improve. Many students who have been turned off of learning at traditional sites find success and, in some cases, even a type of extended family at Street School.
Each of my classes can become a kind of learning community, with students often seeing connections between their schoolwork and their lives. During our project with the theme “Problem/Solution,” a student doing research on noise pollution, for example, may find common ground with a student researching inequality in education, as our campus is located in a heavy-traffic area, near a busy intersection. Students at elite schools have their own challenges and issues, as all young people do, but do not generally experience window-rattling noise from glass pack mufflers or truck horns several times a day while trying to write essays, grasp the concept of photosynthesis, or prepare for state tests.
Teachers at our school are given a great deal of curricular latitude, since we must–by whatever methods necessary–help reverse the negative momentum of students underserved at their previous schools or removed from elite schools for fear of lowering the schools’ average test score statistics and damaging their reputations. In this way, my work has been directed explicitly and intentionally toward creating greater fairness for the students I serve.
This unit will support the mission of Street School by encouraging students to engage with real and imagined transformations, monstrous and otherwise, and in so doing to master state-mandated learning objectives in literacy, as well as the use of modern communications technology. Students will also create research projects that analyze and critique past, present, and future events that may have engendered unfairness and inequality, in order to become agents of progress and change. All this is directed toward the students becoming engaged and informed citizens with the skills to succeed in postsecondary education and the contemporary world.
My Background
I began my work in education as a native English speaker in German-to-English language classes in Austria in the 90s. I entered the stateside teaching profession in Monroe County schools while living in Bloomington, Indiana in the early 2000s. Shortly thereafter, I moved westward and worked at a Catholic school in San Francisco, California, where my job as a “resource specialist” was creating individualized learning strategies for students underserved by the hidebound teaching methods then current in San Francisco parochial schools. These experiences all helped prepare me for my current job as an alternative school teacher in Oklahoma. Work in applied linguistics prepared me to be responsive to the needs of students learning English for the first time. The schools in Monroe County, Indiana helped prepare me to change the trajectories of underserved students who had been turned off of learning by adverse experiences in school. Finally, working as a resource specialist helped me to develop strategies to assist students in developing new skills quickly, to catch up to their peers and the expected level of mastery for their age and grade level. During the eighteen years I’ve been doing alternative education work here, Tulsa alternative schools have undergone a shift, from students who felt they were “sentenced” to a carceral school with small classes and a functioning discipline system (which we had, out of necessity, to have in place) to students and families who learned that schools like Street School are an anomaly in 21st century public schools — a safe place where learning is facilitated for all students and all students are considered important as people, not an anonymous quantity or an expendable commodity. Street School is, at the same time, not an “elite” school from which students with low scores, low incomes, or nonstandard behavior are excluded. Street School is a place for everyone who wants to be successful and is willing to try.
Demographics
The students with whom I work in English III and IV classes generally fall between the ages of sixteen and twenty, with some being slightly younger or older. Many of our students have repeated grades due to problems related to issues in their lives or to their previous sites’ challenges with fostering academic success or constructive behavior. Others have skipped grades due to high levels of ability. They are generally nearer the end of their secondary schooling than the beginning. Students come from diverse backgrounds and display a wide range of academic skills. Street School is a “majority-minority school”–over fifty percent of our students are from a recognized minority group. A high percentage of our students are currently experiencing poverty, as defined by our local government. (100%, for example, qualify for the free lunch program, a relatively objective measure of socioeconomic need.) Students are acutely aware of their economic and social status in a city, state, and country that is politically in flux, with special attention paid by students from marginalized groups to hateful rhetoric and open threats directed toward them and their families from people at the lowest and highest levels of power. These realities, like others, are taken into account in the construction of this unit and, like others, will be leveraged when possible to drive home the relevance of resilience and the uses of education, research, and creativity in creating power for oneself and for one’s community.
Anticipated Summative Product/Outcome
At the end of this unit, each student will have closely read, analyzed, and critically responded to multiple works of literature and popular texts involving transformation and monstrosity. They will develop and demonstrate mastery of literacy skills relevant to the subject matter. At the end of the unit, students will have created original research projects about some aspect of genetically modified organisms and transgenic transformations, a plot point in the Atwood book, the Garland film, and the Kafka story. A research project and presentation on each student’s favorite monster will foster information gathering and communication skills. Exemplary potential subjects will appear as part of a slideshow introducing the research project. These potential subjects for research fall along a broad spectrum. These units are never about prescribing or directing students’ thoughts or beliefs. Rather, they are about exploring and refining the ideas students themselves are already actively forming via their interactions with family, community, and culture.
Unit Content
The intention of this unit is to evaluate, edit, expand, and create activities to increase students’ familiarity with reading, research, and expository and persuasive writing. The existing project-based practices in our classroom have found success, largely due to the commendable hard work and curiosity of the students. I’d like to use the project- and reading-based model with which my students are familiar to deepen their understanding of the subject matter.
This unit will be informed by Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s contributions to the field of monster theory and Cohen’s thesis about the monster as a harbinger of category crisis as well as his seven, as Cohen describes them, “breakable postulates” about what makes a monster and what monsters are. What cultural moment gave rise to the monsters and monster-machines in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “In the Penal Colony?” Was it the First World War or some presentiment of even more deadly times to come? Is the Türhüter in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” a monster if he prohibits the protagonist’s (not just physical) mobility? What borders of the possible does he police? What 21st century anxieties do the partially human creatures in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake embody? What do they reveal, and of what do they attempt to warn us? In what way (and shape and form) do the monsters in Alex Garland’s film of Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihilation escape? At what “gates of difference” do Binti and the Meduse dwell in Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo Prize-winning novella? What mixture of fear and desire compels us to read and look at such awful stories in the first place? What do monster stories invite us to escape? Why have we created such monsters? And, as Cohen asks, if our monsters didn’t exist, how could we?
I hope to deepen and expand my own familiarity with the texts we’re studying and the real-world science that informs them so I can be a more effective adviser and research partner for my students. Theories of “distributed practice” state that content learned in one location can sometimes only be recalled in that location whereas content learned at multiple sites may be retained for life. This is the idea of homework, though homework is, as a matter of policy, never assigned at Street School. Thus, we often explore required Oklahoma English objectives through study of Oklahoma history, science, or mathematics objectives in our ELA classroom. Likewise, I need to be more conversant with primary sources about real-world genetically modified organisms, since a requirement of the research project is to learn about a GMO and its benefits as well as its assumed risks. This is designed to engender more curiosity about scientific innovations in genetics while also reinforcing students’ mastery of English literacy in the way exploring nonfiction science resources can. It will also create an appreciation of the complexity and variety of scientific innovations and challenges so students can become better and better informed community members.
Pedagogy
Street School’s model necessitates a number of aspects for this unit. This curricular unit will be modular, with components that can be “plugged in” for different groups of students, and with more possible project topics and readings than could fit into a single six-week session. The components can be swapped out to reflect the specific strengths and needs–and even the preexisting interests–of each student and each class. It’s necessary to always have “fresh” content and challenges since the small Street School student body means students frequently revisit the same classroom in a different session. This reflects a practice at my current innovative/alternative school site–instead of semesters we have sessions of six four-day weeks. There is not time for more than one or two meaningful research projects or book studies in each session. Multiple versions of the requirements for each project will be created to reflect the preexisting ability of each class–a basic level project for beginners with “fill in the blanks” slideshow templates and relatively lax requirements for citing sources, and an advanced-level project with a rubric and MLA citation requirements. Readings will be done in three alternating ways: reading aloud, audiobook, and silent reading, so that each student’s preferred reading style will be used at least a third of the time, but each student will also have the opportunity to grow more conversant in and comfortable with new reading formats.
This curricular unit will consist of two aspects: independent projects and class readings/explorations of texts. This differentiates the unit for all learners since students who finish the reading activities can work on projects. More advanced readers can create more elaborate projects. Beginning readers can have extra time to complete readings and related activities and then complete relatively rudimentary projects, with teacher support as necessary for each student. I’d like the background reading and research I do to create more depth, coherence, and expertise so I can better guide and advise students at all levels of understanding.
Texts Used in This Unit
(NOTE: This curricular unit is modular, with components that can be “plugged in” for different groups of students, and with more possible project topics and texts than could fit into a single six-week session. The components can–and must–be swapped out to reflect the strengths and needs–and even the preexisting interests–of each student and each class.)
“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka is a story famously plot-mapped by Kurt Vonnegut–not in the classic exposition-rising action-climax-falling action-resolution format but rather as a depressing exposition followed by an unrelenting descent into an infinite abyss. That reliably got a laugh in his lecture “The Shapes of Stories.” It changes our perspective when we learn from Max Brod, Kafka’s great friend and literary executor, that Kafka considered his story hilarious and laughed incessantly when reading it aloud to an audience. (Alternate text: “In the Penal Colony.”)
“Time Enough at Last,” the 1959 Twilight Zone episode in which an avid reader finally has time to read after a nuclear war but accidentally breaks his eyeglasses, helps introduce the “last man on Earth” setting of the Atwood book as well as the concept of situational irony. Rod Serling, reflecting on the legacy of the episode, said, “We were attempting irony and in the view of many in the audience, we created only sadism.” This could fit with a broader exploration of the ethics of disability since glasses, though not always seen as such, are a prosthetic for the disabled.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is another text considered hilarious by its author, who described it as “a joke-filled, fun-packed rollicking adventure story about the downfall of the human race.” (1) The text explores a worst-case-scenario world of genetic research and unchecked technological innovation without ethical guidance. Due to the relatively explicit nature of some of the text, it is my decision, so that the book may be assigned to high school seniors, to redact two sections: “Pixieland Jazz,” and “Hottotts.” While the sections are probably mild by 2025 standards, their depictions of human trafficking are too much to be required reading in my high school classes. Other teachers may, of course, use their own discretion when teaching this book. Atwood, of course, firmly opposes exploitation of all types, and that intent is made clear throughout the book (and all her other works as well) though its grim and unflinching depiction. Whether Atwood would condone the Bowdlerization of her own work, I don’t know. I believe sharing her ideas and singular writing style with my students merits this compromise, and I believe the book works just as well with those sections summarized.
Hybridity, or the transgressing of binaries, has been associated with monstrosity across time and space. This is nowhere truer than in Oryx and Crake and is illustrated through two sets of human/not human characters. Crake, a brilliant but misanthropic young genetic engineer, creates a race of humanoids (the Children of Crake, or “Crakers”) to succeed humanity after our extinction (through a global pandemic of a virulent, Ebola-like pestilence that Crake also engineers). Crakers embody what Crake, a student of biology, history, and pessimistic philosophy, sees as the best of humanity and the animal world. Crakers are vegan and can eat ordinary raw leaves and grass, the way cows, deer, and rabbits do. They are incapable of abstract understanding and thus of developing weapons or even the agriculture Jared Diamond tells us is a prerequisite for human specialization such as standing militaries (Diamond, 1997). Perhaps most important for Crake–probably a psychopath, possibly a proto-”incel”–the Crakers mate in an orderly and impersonal fashion and are thus incapable of romantic jealousy or loneliness.
It’s not so simple, though. As Crakers are incapable of jealousy or loneliness, so too are they incapable of passion and poetry or even symbolic language. In order to digest raw plant matter, they employ the rabbit’s method of caecotrophs for repeated digestion of the same plant matter, the details of which are better not explained here (though Atwood, of course, does in her book!) They lack some of the worst traits of people but also something essential that makes us people in the first place. Crakers are thus both human and not human, an uncanniness that makes Jimmy/Snowman, the last fully human man on Earth and the Crakers’ guardian and educator, feel lonelier than if he really had been alone.
If we understand monstrosity as a “category crisis” and hybridity as a transgressing of binaries, some of the following questions could act as conversational springboards during the study of the book:
- Is the Blood and Roses game a way of establishing that binary and a new “normate”?
- Do the Crakes constitute a binary with Homa sapiens?
- Is young men’s perception of the normate now impossibly warped, beyond all attainability?
- What of the incels’ use of the term “normie”? Is it a frustrated jab at their perceived inability to attain normate status?
Another set of monsters that transgresses the human/animal binary in the novel is the pigoon. Pigoons are enormous pigs genetically engineered to grow multiple human organs for transplant, much like the cloned boarding school students in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. Pigoons are based on real experiments which had begun and were controversial at the time Atwood was writing the novel. As of 2024, such experiments are both largely successful and, though no less uncanny or transgressive of human/animal binaries, are now either accepted or–in our carnivalesque age of constant technological and social upheaval–perhaps merely ignored.
Pigoons, as partially human, seem at first to represent the worst in people and animals, as Crakers at first seem to represent the best. The idea of butchering the animals for meat after their organ “donations” are “completed” is described in Oryx and Crake as “uncomfortably close to cannibalism,” even as it’s noted that an unusual number of items at the pigoon GMO lab’s bistro contain pork products. This is flipped on its head later in the novel when a family of pigoons, escaped and gone feral, use their human neocortical tissue to try to catch and eat Snowman/Jimmy! A race of semi-human pigs is, of course, meant to evoke George Orwell’s Animal Farm too.
Binti, the prizewinning Afrofuturist novella by Nnedi Okorafor, is related because its protagonist, Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka, a sixteen-year-old Himba woman from Namibia, while traveling to an elite intergalactic university, is the sole survivor of an attack by the Meduse, an alien race hostile to all humans. During her resistance to the Meduse, and especially her negotiations and communication with them during the siege of her stateroom (using otjize, a distinctive Himba cultural practice, which has the ability to heal Meduse wounds, as a bargaining tool) Binti comes to understand the Meduse and becomes their representative at Oozma Uni, negotiating for the return of their chief’s severed stinger and eventually being transgenically mutated into a being with some Meduse qualities (their tentacles mimic the plaits treated with otjize) and retaining some human ones. Nnedi Okorafor’s disability–she is paralyzed from the waist down–may inform our unit’s inquiry into eugenics and disability.
Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130, by William Shakespeare, explore the idea of perfection as it applies to love. This is also a theme in Oryx and Crake–genetically modified “perfect people” hold no allure for Snowman, the hapless protagonist of the book. If Snowman, in his earlier incarnation as Jimmy, loved certain members of the human race–now extinct except for him–it was through their imperfections, their humanity. The same sentiment, of course, informs Sonnet 130. We compare Atwood’s famous poem: “You fit into me/Like a hook into an eye/A fish hook/An open eye.” We also compare the “code” of a sonnet, ABABCDCDEFEFGG, to the repeated ACGT; adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T); code of DNA. Students are invited to write original sonnets–beginning students utilize the rhyme scheme only; intermediate students additionally use ten syllables in each line; advanced students are expected to do all that and put each line in iambic pentameter.
The “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species” activity is a fun way to create a glancing familiarity with Linnaeus’s Latin classification system. After a brief introduction to the concept, students will compete to see who can say “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species” the fastest, and whether they can say it faster than the teacher. This activity is stolen wholesale from my beloved seventh grade science teacher, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, from whom I often draw inspiration. (Fitzpatrick did not include “Domain” for some reason, so I won’t either.) I don’t know how to find her to thank her for being so smart and kind and wonderful, so instead I will try to pass the excitement and engagement in learning she created in her classroom on to my students. Afterward, students will also add a complete Latin classification of the GMOs they are researching to their essays. (A fictional genus and species, Sus organifer, is even created by Atwood for her monstrous pigoons in Oryx and Crake! Advanced students may be challenged to infer the full classification of pigoons from those of real world pigs [Domain Eukarya, Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Artiodactyla, Family Suidae, Genus Sus, Species scrofa/domestica, and Subspecies domesticus–or scrofa in case of wild pigs] and Atwood’s neologism.)
Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland and based on the book by Jeff Vandermeer, is a story of the transformation of nature and genetics for the worse, not from human folly but from a source outside of human control. Like the Atwood book, its layers of allegory and allusion invite exploration. Also, in what way is Annihilation–which may seem to some like such a bold new type of poetic or metaphorical science fiction–a conventional “slasher film” of the type Carol J. Clover describes in “Men, Women and Chainsaws”? In Lena we certainly have a final girl (if she is still a “girl” after experiencing the interspecies DNA refraction of “the Shimmer.”) What other aspects of the slasher subgenre does Annihilation typify, and what, if anything, sets it apart? It is sometimes said that there’s only one story–the “plot map”–that people want to read, see, or hear. How do the plot maps of slashers resemble those of romantic comedies, war movies, dance movies, science fiction epics? This exploration of plot, conflict, and genre satisfies the requirements of multiple Oklahoma high school ELA learning objectives.
Never Let Me Go, also directed by Alex Garland and based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, is another exploration of the ethics of genetic meddling, in this case human cloning. As with the GMO pigoons of Oryx and Crake, the Dickensian British boarding school children in this story are grown and “harvested” for human replacement organs for “real” people. The story hinges on the denial of the clones’ humanity by the society that chose to create them. Allegorical equivalencies abound. In her article “Eugenic World Building and Disability: The Strange World of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes,
Hailsham is part of a system that reverses meritocracy’s logic by victimizing the healthy and fit — those who most closely approach normate status. Indeed, in the Hailsham world, neither achievement nor ability will redeem these deserving, accomplished donors from their ineluctable fate — from ending up at the very bottom of this social hierarchy — even while they possess all the bodily and intellectual capital that might put them at the top of the social order. The Hailsham world turns around the fundamental premise of eugenic world building by sacrificing normates for the benefit of people with disabilities. (2)
This is most immediately reminiscent of the way Ernest Hemingway, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and other writers who were combat veterans of World War I wrote about the sacrifice of the most intelligent, able-bodied members of their societies on muddy battlefields while decadent old generals and kings stayed behind to benefit from their sacrifice. It also recalls another highly allegorical novel/manga/film, Battle Royale. The 2000 movie version was directed by Kinji Fukusaku, who, as a child in Japan during World War Two, along with other child laborers, was forced to work in an armaments factory under allied bombardment. This mandatory form of suicide informs the excellent movie Fukasaku was able to make from less excellent source material–the novel. Fukasaku died while directing the sequel, and his son finished the good-but-not-great follow up to a movie so excellent Quentin Tarantino names it as the only movie by another director he wishes he himself had directed.
In considering the ethics of cloning, teachers can refer to the following Jean Baudrillard quote: “Cloning is itself a form of epidemic, of metastasis of the species – of a species in the clutches of identical reproduction and infinite proliferation, beyond sex and death.” (3)
Real Genius, directed by Martha Coolidge, is a funny, free-spirited 80s comedy romp set at a school for kids gifted in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It could be used to illustrate the concept of an elite STEM school like the fictional Watson-Crick Institute in Oryx and Crake, and to inject some much-needed levity into a session that might otherwise collapse under the weight of its grim subject matter.
The Curse of La Llorona is an oft-cited text when Street School students are asked what films they find relatable and inspiring, especially when the subject is monster texts. La Llorona’s transformation from caring mother to jilted lover to child murderer the supernatural monster fits perfectly with the topic of this unit.
Independent Projects and Activities
The “My Favorite Monster” Project is an entry-level project in the form of a slideshow. Students are asked to choose a favorite monster and to research and explain it, beginning with simple facts and leading up to a more complex perspective on the monster’s origin, symbolism, and significance. Students compare, contrast, and appreciate each other’s monsters and presentation styles.
In the Sonnet-writing/DNA Project we look at the “perfection” or the genetically engineered Crakers in Oryx and Crake and at Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130, by William Shakespeare and the idea of perfection as it applies to love. Each student chooses which of those poems comes closest to their idea of love–the worshipful 18 or the more circumspect 130. We compare the “code” of a sonnet, ABABCDCDEFEFGG, to the repeated ACGT code of DNA. Students are invited to write original sonnets–beginning students use the rhyme scheme only; intermediate students edit to use ten syllables in each line; advanced students do all that and put each line in iambic pentameter. Using these complex tools–represented by a simple sequence of letters–the students “engineer” their own original poems. They may be, but need not be, romantic love poems. One student wrote quite a passionate sonnet about his love for lasagna.
In the Craker/Pigoon Essay, students will explore these two groups of characters from Oryx and Crake–the humanoid Crakers and the partially human pigs called Pigoons–and their monstrous transgressions of the human/animal binary. Students will begin their analysis by creating a series of graphic organizers, specifically Venn diagrams–1. Craker/Human, 2. Pigoon/Human, and 3. Craker/Pigoon. Students new to essay writing will choose the diagram with the best (or most) connections and write a well-organized essay based on the ideas it contains. Advanced students will be asked to create an essay utilizing all three diagrams for an overview of the entire novel’s inquiry into the human, the posthuman, and how many boundaries genetic engineering can transgress before the nature of humanness itself is brought into question.
The Genetically Modified Organism Essay involves research into a real-world genetically modified organism. Instructions for the essay are in the form of an essay prompt similar to one that might be found on a standardized test, essay contest, or college entrance application. Example presentation.
The Grex Project will be a multimedia presentation in which students are randomly selected in pairs to combine the subjects of their GMO essay projects into grexes, that is, into chimera-like monsters that combine incompatible organisms, as occurs in “The Metamorphosis,” Oryx and Crake, and Annihilation.
Appendix for Oklahoma Academic Standards
Above all, this curricular unit is designed to help students to master the literacy skills prescribed by the state of Oklahoma. It is, after all, designed for an English class, and I am an English teacher. Before anything else, my main duty and job is to help students become better readers, writers, and critical thinkers. The work we do in our classroom engages all Oklahoma Academic Standards, but these are some on which this unit especially focuses. (Eleventh grade objectives are specifically addressed here, but equivalent objectives exist, at an appropriately higher level of complexity and challenge, at the senior level too.)
11.1.L.1 Students will actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules with control of verbal and nonverbal cues. The research aspect of the independent projects is important. It is through this that students will learn to seek out and to assess the relevance and validity of sources of information about their chosen topic. Just as important, though, is the presentation aspect. Fully a quarter of the assessment rubric for the project involves this final phase of the research–its presentation. After all, knowledge and ideas lose their potency if they cannot be effectively communicated. Students, having learned about new people, practices, or ideas that piqued their interest, now share the aspects they found interesting. Likewise, the students who serve as audience members learn the art of active attention. Their ability to be engaged audience members, and to treat the presenter and the content they are presenting with respect, are also reflected in their final project score, with deductions for every breach in decorum. These skills will be valuable in later life, whether in higher education, as the “scribe” for a Marine boot camp training platoon, or as a participant in mandatory staff meetings in any profession. Conveying and receiving information, and assessing it once it has been conveyed, is a key human skill. It should not be neglected.
11.1.S.2 Students will follow agreed-upon rules as they engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing, expressing their own ideas clearly, building on the ideas of others, and respectfully disagreeing when necessary in pairs, diverse groups, and whole-class settings. Though students should display a minimum degree of respect for the speaker presenting and the subject of theory research, it is never necessary to agree with the presenter’s conclusions or with the ideas or actions of the subject of the research. Civil practices for challenging ideas are also inculcated in the best of the project presentations. A classroom should never be a place where ideas are force-fed. If it is, students trained in orthodoxy are vulnerable to the next demagogue they encounter. Rather, a classroom should be a place of inquiry where reasoned disagreement–with the presenter’s opinions and conclusions and with those of the person being researched–can be civilly, rationally expressed.
11.2.R.1 Students will summarize the main ideas and paraphrase significant parts of increasingly complex texts. In an ideal world, students would arrive at Street School at grade level for reading and textual analysis and we would proceed from there. In the world as it is, no one comes to an alternative education site because their prior education was ideal. Instead, students often arrive at Street School with significant learning loss. The recent pandemic lockdown has, of course, exacerbated this situation. As a result, this unit includes texts written on a very basic level–sometimes about subjects not obviously related to the unit topic–and works toward mastery of grade-level fiction and nonfiction texts (such as a nonlinear Margaret Atwood novel and sonnets by Shakespeare) by the end of the six-week session. If students can master and become confident with analysis of texts they can easily read, understand, and enjoy, they are much more confident and engaged later when presented with more structurally and linguistically sophisticated material.
11.4.R.4 Students will analyze and evaluate the relationships among words with multiple meanings and recognize the connotation and denotation of words. This is a valuable skill in the decoding of complex language. A key skill in understanding complex language can be knowing the origin and etymology of words. Much complex English language, such as “legalese,” seems “foreign” to English speakers because of the latinate origins of many of the words–a legacy of the Norman Conquest of 1066. Students’ greater facility with words used in Latin classification of organisms can help to create a basis for greater understanding and develop skills for further language translation and decoding.
11.4.W.1 Students will use precise, grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate complex ideas. Of course, the objective of all learning in English class is to help students develop into effective, confident readers and writers. The final examination in all sessions is an essay reflecting on, and finding connections among, the texts explored during the six-week session.
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Notes
- Lynskey, 172
- Garland-Thompson, 138
- McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk.