When I first thought about becoming an English teacher, I thought about all the great things I've learned from literature. I often felt lonely when I was younger and reading was the one thing that always made me feel not so lonely. I didn't think much about teaching students how to read an informative, non-fiction text.
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" could have been taught in many different ways. I still believe that teaching students to decipher the 5 W's is important but I wish we worked more on the literary devices MLK used that made the text so powerful. Because the essay worked as such a great persuasive piece, I think we should have focused more of attention on that aspect of the text. It was originally in our lesson plan but because we overestimated how much time we really had, we didn't get to the part of the plan. We might have been able to go through the 5 W's with just the word cloud alone and then dive into the text afterwards.
Professor Kajder made a point about how different the timing would be if we had actual 9th graders in the class. They need much more time to skim through the piece, more time to process information, and more time to understand the lesson. We might have been able to go through the whole lesson plan if we were making the entire lesson based the letter.
I think the word cloud was a good hook that prepared the students for the text they were about to read. I'm curious how actual 9th graders would interpret the words. Obviously graduate students who are familiar with a wide range of texts can piece the puzzle together quicker but I'm guessing 9th graders predictions would be somewhat different.
Overall, I think the biggest take away from this mini lesson for me was to manage time more wisely. I think as teachers, we have to decide whats most important and what students really need to learn and build from there.
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