Literary Homelands: The White Tiger

Literary Homelands isn't the most popular of the Extension English 1 Electives but it sure has a lot of grist in its proverbial mill. I've written before about Literary Homelands and how difficulty it would be to escape an Indian perspective in light of its Prescribed Texts. It's with this in mind that I gravitated towards Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger as the extended Prescribed Text to go alongside Eileen Chong's Burning Rice and Andrew Bovell's adaptation of The Secret River.  

The White Tiger is a fantastic text - ripe for so much discussion and such a breeze to read. It explores postcolonialism in the 21st century, the idea of multiple overlapping homelands connected to a class system, the impact of globalisation and transnationalism on Indian culture and society, and the power relationships between the priviliged and the silenced. It's a perfect text for exploring the Elective.

Below is a series of annotations on the novel done in the same style as similar documents found on this blog for Dracula, The Lost Boys and The Secret River. The first column features quotes and textual evidence from the text. Each example is then paired with techniques used by the author and some analysis that ties it to the Elective. 

Study Guide - The Annotated White Tiger

Hag-Seed: Textual Conversations with The Tempest

I'm about mid-way through teaching Module A: Textual Conversations to Year 12 Advanced English and, in light of its newness, it's pretty much a case of so-far, so-good. A little while ago I put up an annotated Tempest as a starting point for the module but I'm acutely aware that this only approximately accounts for half of what students need to cover in having their 'textual conversations'. Without replicating the entire text like what has been done with The Tempest above, annotating a novel can be a little more challenging. 

Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed is a wonderfully layered and highly accessible text that both remakes and comments on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The document below works as both a series of annotations and a study guide for students who are looking to draw connections between Hag-Seed and its progenitor. In said document:

• The first column covers quotes and examples from Hag-Seed. 
• The second column identifies techniques used by Atwood in relation to the example, allowing for students to build metalanguage and/or analyse authorial purpose and effective construction of language.
• The third column directs the reader to make comparisons or recognise the significance of the example in relation to the module. 

I've included some questions for students outlined in bold; about a couple per page in the third column. I've told my class that, in revising Hag-Seed as the HSC approaches, that they should aim to work their way through this study guide's questions throughout the remainder of the school year.

Anyway, here it is: Hag-Seed Study Guide.

Disclaimer: please excuse any typos or mistakes, it's a first draft. I'll revise it again when I teach it a second time.

The Tempest Annotated

Hello!

One of the challenges of tackling Shakespeare in the English classroom is finding the time to have your students read it. Assigning the text as a reading will work for some students but, owing to the nature of drama itself as a narrative genre best experienced live, this isn't going to work for the majority of the class. 

Ideally, you would have your students watch the play but this also isn't always practical. And, when we get to Year 11 and 12, the idea of setting aside entire periods to read through Shakespeare inspires a special kind of anxiety related to covering course content, outcomes, unpacking metalanguage, etc., ad nauseum, whatevs. 

There's also that kid in each class who also tells you that they've read the text, honest guv'nor, and then will write a paragraph about the way Prospero takes revenge by tricking Othello into feeling jealous towards his mother Gertrude. You want to snap, "You aint read nuthin'!" but the calm veneer of professionalism instead has it emerge as a polite "Hmmm, not quite."

The structuring of the new Advanced English syllabus now means, for better or worse, that a lot of us will be teaching Shakespeare through The Tempest as part of Module A: Textual Conversations. This means that there is also a novel to read alongside it, Margaret Atwood's vibrantly metatextual Hag-Seed, which adds an extra dimension to the logistics of fitting the module into the space of approximately 10 weeks. 

Something that seems to have worked with my current class was squeezing the reading of The Tempest into the end of the previous term. The best approach I've found for doing Shakespeare with Year 12 is to have the play read in one big go. In the past I've run this on a Saturday or on a day in the school holidays but, as my students had schedules that didn't fit with this at the end of last year, I organised it as an incursion on the next-to-last day of the term instead. With one of the less-used rooms in the school booked, we met as a class first thing in the morning with some breakfast, assigned roles, and read the text all the way through with a 20 minute intermission break. This approximately took us about 3 or 3.5 hours and now the entire class can say that they've read the entire text. And, most importantly, I believe them!

Even Advanced English students will have a varied response to the idea of reading Shakespeare - not all of them are fans. Some level of support therefore needs to be supplied in helping to translate the language while they read. I don't think we should have them initially read the No Fear version (as helpful as this can be as a supplementary study text) as it's important that Advanced students engage with Shakespeare's language to gain a complete understanding of how the text is constructed. 

Luckily Shakespeare is well beyond the constraints of copyright law, so there was nothing stopping me from creating a new edition of the text that would include annotations in support of our context. The link below includes an unabridged presentation of The Tempest with a series of annotations alongside the original text. 

The Tempest Annotated - full text.

Hopefully this helps get the students through the play, which is imperative as a base level of engagement before they read Atwood's novel. Students can come back to this version throughout the module to analyse examples and tie them to Hag-Seed.

A Monster Calls - Book Annotating

I got around purchasing an entire class' worth of little post-its (which can get expensive) by just cutting up the bigger post-its.

Mid-way through last year I attended the AATE/ALEA National English Conference in Hobart and was particularly taken with American educator Cris Tovani's work on getting students to engage with active-reading. In particular, Tovani spoke about bringing the focus back on reading during a class novel study through the use of independent annotating. She termed these as 'V.I.P.s' aka 'Very Important Points'.

In this lecture, Tovani explained that the students are given a range of coloured post-it notes, with each colour corresponding with a kind of annotation, and the examples she gave from her own teaching demonstrated a wonderful array of student-led discussion points. Inspired by this, I decided to give it a go with a novel study in one of my own classes.

The book in question was A Monster Calls, which I matched up with my mixed ability Year 10 class. Instead of leaving the annotating as homework I decided to eschew the use of comprehension questions in favour of dedicating more time to reading in class, and then letting the students annotate after each chapter was completed with the use of a pre-provided schema to guide them.

Cris Tovani, pedagogue extraordinaire

On this schema I outlined 6 different categories to correspond with the 6 different coloured post-it notes supplied. These were:

• Connect: Note when something from the book reminds you of something from your life, or something you have seen/read, or connects to a prediction you have made about the novel. 
• Question: Write down questions you have about the novel as you think them up while you read.
• Infer/Predict: Flag bits where you have used examples from the text to figure out something in relation to the novel, or have made a new prediction.
• Conflict: Note parts of the text where conflict occurs (this particular novel study was part of a larger unit on texts that deal with conflict)
• Monitor: Highlight parts that didn't make sense to you at first, or at all, or words that were unfamiliar to you.
• Evaluate: This can be your opinion about things happening in the story, things you like/dislike, or just general thoughts. 

The schema can be downloaded here.

A sample from class.

I was surprised (and happy) at how enthusiastically a lot of students got into this. One student seemed to take it as a challenge to see how many flags he could put into each chapter. The upshot of this, besides increased engagement with the text, is that the students were able to use their own annotations to call upon examples to use in their own independent analysis of the novel later on. 

While we're talking about novel study, here are three simple and relevant pointers I've picked up over the last 8 years in regards to teaching novels with mixed ability junior classes:

• Keep the novels in the classroom. If the students take them home then you might not see them all again, and it becomes difficult for these students to stay on-task in lessons that require them to have the books in front of them if they've forgotten to bring them.
• For mixed ability classes, read the entire text aloud while the students read along. This will ensure that you can stick to some kind of schedule/timeframe... a novel study can become messy if students are left to read on their own; some will finish the book in the first few days, others will never get past the first few pages. I know there are very strong arguments against this practice, however I was wholly converted last year by Steven Layne's fantastic lecture on reading aloud, which turned out to be perfect for my own Western Sydney context. 
• Pick a novel of shorter length. The reading ages of junior students vary more the closer they get to senior school, you could have some students who would read a 900 page Game of Thrones novel and others who would need help focusing on finishing one of Roald Dahl's wonderful children's novels. You typically only have 50-70% of a term to get through a novel and the lower ability students will lose focus if they are asked to sustain engagement with an adult-length novel. By all means, extend the more literate students with extra texts that they can read on their own - chances are that they already have a love of reading if they are this literate - but it's also important not to leave the rest of the class behind and to give them every chance of appreciating what reading can offer.
  

There will be detractors in regards to the above, but keep in mind that there are also students who often get to Year 11 and are able to say, "I've never read a single book, not even in previous years of English when the rest of the class read the class novel". By reading aloud during class time, and ensuring that it's a novel that the whole class can get through, the aforementioned disengaged students will get to Year 11 and be able to say, "Actually, I read an entire book, along with the rest of the class".   

On a final note, I also highly recommend A Monster Calls because it's a poignant, highly engaging read that will prompt discussion and stay with the reader long after it's finished.

Analysing Text to Facilitate Better Writing

Year 9: Youth Culture

At the HSC level, English becomes heavily reliant on a student's ability to write. This is a point in a student's education where it doesn't matter how eloquent and insightful they are during class discussion; if they are unable to formulate their ideas into a cohesive and sustained, structured piece of writing then they are going to run into big problems.

The solution is backward mapping. If we extrapolate the skills needed for quality HSC-level composition and map them backwards through the curriculum for Stages 6, 5 and 4, then we can help students build the technical expertise needed for this kind of text construction. 

There are several ways that English teachers work towards this goal. The most common approach is perhaps through the teaching of paragraph construction formulae - things such as PEEL (Point-Example-Explanation-Link), PEAL (Point-Example-Analysis-Link), TEAL (Topic-Example-Analysis-Link), TEEEEL (Topic-Example-Explanation-Example-Explanation-Link)... you get the point, they're all kind of the same. 

Another approach is text analysis. This is a method that works particularly well with Year 9, and it involves giving students a structured response and asking them to firstly identify the content, or main point, of each paragraph (as opposed to the structural components). The idea here is that students are asked to identify the concept behind separating paragraphs in general, the fact that each paragraph needs its own theme or topic sentence, and it is possibly too readily taken for granted when we teach Year 9 students that they will automatically know what the point is behind paragraphing. 

Run a diagnostic text with a mixed ability Year 9 class where they're asked to compose an extended response, and you'll quickly see what I mean.

There's simply no point in teaching the individual elements of constructing paragraphs if students don't even know what a paragraph is or how it works. You have to crawl before you can walk. (Sidenote: if your class exhibits a wide disparity between those who can and those who can't, then this is where differentiation of activities will also come in handy).

The other thing that works well with text analysis is getting students to identify cohesive devices that the author has used to avoid unnecessary repetition. This means:

• Explicit acknowledgement of reference terms (such as 'these' - what does 'these' refer to?)
• Text chains (the use of synonyms to refer to the same idea). 

Unless we show this to students, or test them, we simply can't tell if a student understands how these building blocks of cohesion work. There's often a shift in high school English teaching away from the explicit teaching of grammar in favour of more conceptual forms of engagement, but I would argue that there is room for both and that we are doing some students a disservice by skipping more straightforward means of text analysis. The grammatical approach not only caters to lower ability students, it can also offer a foundation of knowledge for students with learning difficulties, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and those whose epistemology favours ways of learning that are less compatible with English in general (all the prospective STEMsters out there!)

Resource 1

Below are two resources for a Youth Culture unit my school teaches. The focus of the unit is on issues related to being a teenager, with a sizeable slice of time dedicated to the inimitable classic '80s film The Breakfast Club. With that in mind, the text below is an introductory piece about the history of teen films, written to also function as part of our school's Focus on Reading project (in which we start every junior English class with ten minutes of reading).

Resource 1 - This can be put onscreen to demonstrate to students what you want done with the text in front of them.

Resource 2 - This is the version that can be handed to the students for them to annotate.

For more on teaching the skill of annotation to juniors, there's a novel study activity here: Extending Stage 4 Students in English
For more on text chains, see this History resources: Text Analysis: The Rise of China

Extending Stage 4 Students in English

Blueback, a novel that I highly recommend for Year 7 students - it's both easy to read and possesses depth of language/ideas.

In addition to my role as classroom teacher, I also work at my school as the Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator. This has predominantly meant the implementation of a class-sized pull-out program for identified gifted students (more on this at a future date), however, before I got to that point I piloted an experimental phase in which individual students with potential giftedness were targeted. At the time (2 years ago), I was teaching a mixed-ability Year 7 English class. There were two students in particular in this class who showed classic signs of advanced ability and I wanted to give them a meaningful opportunity to use and stretch this ability. 

It's worth noting that these were the sort of students who would not initially present as gifted upon first impression but, after extensive diagnostic testing, I felt that I had confirmed that their potential had gone unrecognised. Before I could create a larger program that would cater to students such as these and, indeed, develop a system of testing that would establish levels of giftedness amongst their entire cohort, it would be necessary to pilot a smaller program of increased support that would prove the validity of specifically catering for gifted students. 

So now we get to the real point of this blog entry, extending these two Year 7 students with activities based on the current topic that was running during class-time. In line with the requisite academic research, I decided that the work had to be:

• Relevant to what was being studied. 
• Not a simple case of 'extra' work.
• The kind of work that would challenge these students enough to allow them to devote the same amount of quality time that any other student would spend on core activities back in the mixed classroom. 

Anything less would risk student disengagement, the same sort of thing that led to these kids 'flying under the radar' in the first place.   

The topic in question back in 2014 was a novel study of Tim Winton's beautiful ecological story Blueback. The resource I've attached below was designed to be used by tutors who had been assigned to the targeted students, but, really, it can be used in any context.

In Stage 4, annotating texts is probably something that most students would not be completely comfortable with. I usually introduce it to Year 9 students, which put me in mind of using it with gifted Year 7s as it would be a step-up for them. The style of annotation featured in the resource makes use of a few higher order skills:

• The annotating of techniques is a form of attribute-listing that requires students to taxonomise information in their heads.
• The second part of the activity, in which students identify their own techniques, contains elements of backwards-engineering. 
• Explicitly teaching the skill of annotating equips gifted students with a method that they can use to design their own systems for note-taking.

I've resisted explaining the actual mechanics of the resource in any great detail because it's all on the sheet below. If you have any specific activities that you like to use to extend junior students, please feel free to drop me a comment below - I'm always on the look-out for more ideas!

Resource: Extending Stage 4 Students in English