English Nerd

I don’t know about where you live, but here in the midwest we’re having a miserable winter. I’m talking ice storms, snow, subfreezing temperatures, and wind that stings when it hits your face. And I don’t know about you, but I loathe winter. I enjoy snow on Christmas (which we actually were lucky enough to have this year!), but after that, I’m ready for spring. I’m ready for baseball games and blue skies. I’m ready to be able to leave my house without spending a ridiculous amount of time bundling up. I’m ready to be able to wear a skirt to work for crying out loud! I know what Punxsutawney Phil said, but I’m still incredulous.

Don't the the beauty fool you...

photo credit: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/27568206_e6b5f32bd3_b.jpg

But the real problem with this winter (and the reason for this post) is this: SNOW DAYS. Two words most teachers love to hear. And I’ll admit, the first couple of unexpected days off left me just as giddy as my students. I got to snuggle in bed for a couple extra hours, spend time with my new love (AKA my Mac Book Pro, Eve), catch up on reading my magazines, and watch terrible daytime TV that I am too ashamed to add to my DVR but secretly love. But so far, we’ve used SEVEN snow days. Yep. Seven. My district builds in six extra days at the end of our calendar each year for snow days. If we use fewer than six, we get out early (woo hoo!). If we use more than six, we have to make them up somewhere. This year, we’re losing a day off on Good Friday. While I’m thankful that they’re not taking away any spring break days (during which I’ll be in sunny California), I dread the fact that now we have no days off in April.

Even worse than losing time off when most teachers desperately need a break is the constant rescheduling and rearranging of my calendar. As a third-year teacher, I find that one thing I still struggle with is planning and being able to predict how much time something will take. If I plan something for three class periods, it ends up taking 20 minutes. If I set aside 30 minutes for an activity/lesson, I realize that my students didn’t get it and we need to spend a couple more days on it. Add in the fact that kids are even more lazy after returning from three and a half snow days in a row, and it’s nearly impossible to feel any sort of accomplishment or progress. I feel like until this week I haven’t gotten anything done this semester.

If you have any tips for perfecting the planning process (I love alliteration), I’d be happy to hear them, but this post is less of a cry for help and more of a chance to vent my frustrations about winter. How do you feel about winter/snow days? How do you deal with the scheduling headaches of being a teacher?

How’s that for a blog title?  (And yes, it’s spelled correctly…I am an English nerd, after all.)  Today I tried a lesson on tone and mood with my sophomores and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went.  If you’re an English teacher and if your kids are anything like mine, you’re all too aware of the fact that tone and mood are two elements of literature that the students don’t get.  From my (albeit limited) experience with high schoolers, they don’t “get it” for a few reasons.

1. They just don’t have the vocabulary necessary to describe the tone or mood of a piece of literature, a film, etc.

2. They have a hard time correctly identifying the tone of a piece because they can’t remember that tone is an author’s attitude toward a subject.  I don’t think my kids spend much (if any) time thinking about authorship, so they tend to forget that authors (and speakers) are taking a certain position toward the subject about which they write/speak.

3. They can’t keep tone and mood straight.  It never fails that when I ask my class, “What is tone?” the first response I get is, “It’s like mood.”  Well, it may be kind of like mood, but it is also very different.  Tone deals with the attitude of the author, whereas mood is how you feel after reading/viewing a work.

At first I thought this lesson seemed elementary (admittedly it was designed for middle school), but my kids responded well and appropriately.  It really helped giving them the handouts with tone and mood vocabulary, since they can never come up with the terms on their own.  I let them know that they would likely see words on the handouts that they wouldn’t know, but that it didn’t matter because there should be plenty of words they do know.  I think sometimes kids just need teachers to focus on what they already know and not have a ton of new information shoved down their throats.  Tone and mood are difficult enough without adding the stress of learning a ton of new vocabulary, so I decided to give them the lists and encourage (but not require) them to look up some of the words they didn’t know.  Knowing my students, maybe one or two will actually look up some of the words, but that wasn’t the point of this lesson.  Even my lower-level kids were offering tone and mood words to describe the trailers.  Even the quiet kids were participating.  And they were using all the right words.  That is what I call a success.

English teachers: what are some lessons or approaches you use to teach tone and mood?

All teachers: What lessons have surprised you because they just worked so well?