Late Learning Letter

This quarter was an enlightening one, and English 439 was a good chunk of that enlightenment.

Of the major assignments we performed in this class, each one had its merits and pitfalls. The Unit Plan was... strenuous. The biggest challenge was in dealing with the 15 edTPA longform lesson plans. They're time consuming, and time is precious. Not to mention that once on the job, edTPA lesson plans will be irrelevant. My mentor teacher literally jots her lessons down on a yellow legal pad. But I digress. The book talks were fun, and I learned about a lot of young adult/teen literature that I might otherwise have overlooked, and it's been helpful so far in my placement classroom. I saved all the handouts I got, as well, should I ever need to reference specific books. In such an instance, it would be nice to have those handy. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what the "mini lessons" are.

The theories and concepts we discussed in class that I think will be most advantageous to me are the discussion methods (I tried once to employ them, bearing no fruit) and the idea of using graphic novels as a way to coax hesitant students into literature. They're very likely ideas I'll put into practice. Also there was something Dr. Sean mentioned about how when you're getting into the "difficult" topics, those are likely the important ones to explore. And that really resonated with me. If we avoid difficult conversations, we end up with a group of people who don't know how to handle strenuous situations in their daily lives, and that, to me, seems more a dysfunction than a boon.

I'm usually pretty good with participation. I'm loud, outgoing, and vocal, and will scarcely shy away from being in front of a crowd. And I also try to use humor to punctuate those skills. When we had our round-table discussions on things, I tried to offer what insight I could, sometimes in the interest of playing devil's advocate. I'm the sort of guy who will take a stance for the Aristotelian practice over whether I necessarily believe in what I'm supporting or not. It makes discussion much more interesting, in my opinion. If there was anything I think I could have done better, it was likely being organized. I've struggled with that this quarter for some reason, and I need to get back on top of it.

In the end, this class taught me much that I hope to employ in my classroom. And I hope I didn't get this in too late to at least get half-credit or so. Somehow I missed that it was supposed to be in at noon. To that end, I'll reap what I sow. Thanks for a great quarter, Dr. Sean. You're a bro.

Weisel's Night

Holocaust units are all the rage. And for good reason. Elie Weisel's Night is another in a long train of literary pieces that grants us a firsthand account of what it was to belong to be Jewish during the height of the Third Reich's power. What I think would be a worthwhile take on this book is to toss it into a mix with other heavy World War Two books and create a unit centered around lit circles, alongside the quintessential Diary of Anne Frank, Man's Search for Meaning, Number the Stars, Rena's Promise, and countless others. The possibilities here are endless.

We find ourselves in a strange time where the Holocaust no longer sits in living memory. The last survivors, the last people to experience the atrocities of the Second World War, are all dying, and with them dies the Holocaust as a part of living memory. It may fade into historical obscurity unless we keep the discussion alive and going and actively try to learn from our mistakes, and ensure that no one forgets.

Holocaust units aren't easy. For anyone. They're shocking and heartwrenching and real. For students to truly comprehend and appreciate the gravity of what happened and the pertinence of the voices that speak to us from the late 1930s and early 1940s, they need to be of mature enough mind to handle that kind of weight and take it seriously. Personally I wouldn't teach this to any students younger than 8th grade. And probably honors, at that.

Something my mentor teacher is doing right now with her Holocaust unit is that she had the students create butterflies that represent individual people, with written hopes, dreams, interests, etc. And as they read journal entries and people die in the concentration camps, butterflies are taken down forever. It's a powerful metaphor and really drives the point home for these students. Something similar to that could be reappropriated for use with Night.

KAPOW

While many teachers (usually of an older generation) might look down their noses at the prospect of bringing comic books into the classroom, comics and graphic novels are a deceptively clever way to get reluctant readers to engage in literature. The themes present in Marvel superheroes are every bit as valid as classics. Why should Peter Parker's Hero's Journey be scoffed at while Beowulf's is placed on a pedestal? Why should Jughead be ill-favored while "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is praised? What's the real difference between "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and classic myth? While the use of graphic novels and comics may seem counterintuitive, it's definitely a way to teach literary concepts in ways that can reach more learning styles than simple reading and note-taking. The images engage readers and the reading doesn't feel like a chore, anymore.



I can imagine tasking students with a graphic novel about Batman. Some story that deals with the Joker in a fundamental, classic way. Then I can give an assignment that asks the students to analyze the relationship between Batman and the Joker and how they are a classic example of a diametrically opposed dichotomy. According to an article published by the National Council of Teachers of English, manga "are very popular with our students, so much so that many students are actually learning Japanese so that they can read the newest manga straight off the press, instead of waiting for translations.” The article mentions how graphic novels can be used to teach grammar, punctuation, and appreciation for the visual arts. Rachael Sawyer Perkins of Dolores Street Elementary School in Carson, California had this to say on the subject: “For students who lack the ability to visualize as they read, it provides a graphic sense that approximates what good readers do as they read. Moreover, it provides an excellent way for reluctant writers to communicate a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. I think comics and graphic novels are an excellent vehicle for teaching writing, as a story has to be pared down to its most basic elements. It is easy for the students to look at a short comic strip and identify story elements.” How any forward-thinking teacher could discount comics as a learning tool is beyond me.

More like Edgar Allan Broe

Ah, good ol' Poe. The tragic and deranged mad poet with the sort of clout to reach "The Simpsons" and "Altered Carbon" while simultaneously maintaining a firm grasp on the imaginations and curricula of students everywhere--he holds a special place in my heart, along with H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos--minus the racism), Percy Bysshe Shelley ("Ozymandias"), and Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). I'm a massive fan of Victorian Gothic styles of writing, and Poe certainly brought those mentalities to America as one of the strange outliers of the Romantic movement.

The story of his that I'm most familiar with is "The Fall of the House of Usher," where through moral and philosophical degradation, the house and the House of Usher are deconstructed - the house crumbles and falls into the swamp and the House is ended when both Roderick Usher and his sister/lover/zombie Madeline die. Poe has a knack for bringing gradual madness to his characters, which is what makes his writing so compelling; the impending dread, the fear of the unknown, the mind playing tricks upon itself, these are all devices that Poe explores.

In the classroom, I think Poe is a fantastic source of figurative language and is a clear avenue down which to stroll when considering teaching lessons on subtextual clues and metaphor. The dark, "creepy" manner of Poe's works could be a nice reprieve from some of the other "typical" sorts of literature that make themselves present in the classroom, or they might be ignored by other students for how "weird" they are. However, I'm of the mind that students should experience literature that they otherwise wouldn't stumble upon themselves. Shouldn't we try to expand the repertoire of our students? In most cases, they won't do it themselves.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a staple around these parts. I've been to many of the places the protagonist--Junior--has been, himself. This book is similar in many ways to The Education of Margot Sanchez in that it offers a coming-of-age story from the perspective of a character who isn't one of the "usual" suspects--to mean white--and it can add a helping of multiculturalism to any classroom. What I said about Sanchez can be true of Part-Time Indian in reverse, at least as far as boys and girls are concerned. Boys will connect with Junior far more easily than girls will, even if they don't connect on a cultural basis. In that way, students are largely placed into the perspective of a student who doesn't go to a predominately white, more well-to-do school and punctuates that disparity by establishing Junior's surroundings on the reservation and then changing them to something students may be more familiar with. The effect in this way is twofold; students can see that not everyone is as privileged as they may be, or they might feel some measure of validation in sharing similar experiences with Junior, and students may learn not to take what they have for granted, as many don't have the same opportunities that they do, be it for cultural reasons, skin color, socioeconomic status, or location.

What would be tough to teach is the fact that the more...intimate parts... of students' lives may be laid bare via Junior as a proxy, dealing with pornography and masturbation and how to approach the opposite sex. However, these issues are simply a part of the "coming-of-age" formula and are separated and underscored by life lessons from which all students can learn. As I said with Sanchez, let this book be available to teachers who have the necessary experience and command of the classroom. Those of us who are still a tad damp behind the ears probably won't want to get into such a complicated book so soon in our educational career.

World War Z Book Talk

https://drive.google.com/open?id=18ZpY_BdPiiwVamCz8hrdqg6kZaW-vh2Y

The Education of Margot Sanchez

What I enjoy about literature such as this is its ability to bring more perspectives and cultures into the classroom, thereby creating a more worldly, inclusive, and accepting classroom culture. While others might see the difficulty in getting boys in a class to read it, I see an opportunity. Sure, it'll be a rough start, but I think proper encouragement and consideration for points of view and opening students up to the possibility of seeing things from another angle is incredibly important, especially in a world where the common societal attitude is "my opinion is the best and everyone else is wrong." By showing students events that occur through someone else's eyes, we're not only helping the students at a scholastic level, but at a level of empathy, as well.

As to whether it's appropriate to teach in a classroom is another matter entirely. I think new teachers would struggle with the content in this book, especially if the students are below 10th grade. Personally I wouldn't teach it below 11th, but that's just me. For more experienced teachers, I think that this book could work wonders in a multicultural classroom with the proper support and class discussion. The romance may be a tough sell for some teachers, but I think it's a good way to have students relate to the novel via the experiences they're currently muddling through. In fact, the entire "coming-of-age" subgenre deals with issues that these high school students deal with on a daily basis--that's why we call them "coming-of-age." I know that as I read, I found myself reminiscing about my own experiences at that age and how differently--and yet similar--the experiences are between Margot and myself; confusion about romance, the intrusive sexual thoughts, issues regarding friends and enemies, the notion of experimentation with substances, all of that. And on these bases, I'd likely teach a unit on this novel once I'd gotten a few years of teaching under my belt.

Readicide

Kelly Gallagher, with his book Readicide points out that the act of reading in classroom instruction is slowly yet surely finding its way, as its title implies, among the extinct, like the dodo or Tasmanian devil. Gallagher shows that reading is no longer as stressed as it once was in the classroom, and he thinks our society is suffering for it. I tend to agree. When we use reading as only a practical tool, it pulls the joy and the art from it. When, during World War II, Churchill's advisors suggested cutting funding for the arts, Churchill said, "Then what the hell are we fighting for?" Literature is an art. Poetry is an art. Art exists to help us explore our existence and create our own meanings for existence. If we undermine reading as a pleasurable activity, we're only doing ourselves a disservice.

In my placement classroom, we operate with Springboard curriculum. My mentor teacher commonly remarks that she doesn't like how Springboard has gutted literature, leaving us with a literary skeleton crew with which to man the ship of our students' learning. Most of the students in our classroom read only because they're supposed to. They read the bare minimum to maintain the illusion that they are trying, and otherwise ignore their literature. Some students, namely in the accelerated programs, avidly consume books with a ravenous hunger. And they'll be fine. The rest, though, they represent our society's relationship with reading. As Gallagher cites in his introduction, roughly 27% of all adults didn't read a single book in the last year. While they may be reading news or magazines or Facebook comments, they're not engaging with literature, with the art of human expression in the written word. And it's a shame.

I think the best way to counter this steep decline of pleasure reading is to become knowledgeable about literature. To know and understand a wide variety of novels and books gives us the means to help students pursue their interests while simultaneously and surreptitiously giving them the chops to become better readers. Standardized testing is a big beast, and it will take more than one knight in shining armor to bring it down. Until such a monster withers away, we must learn to move around it and fill the gaps it leaves behind ourselves.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

The part of this book that stood out to me the most was the identification of different voices that a reader uses while... well... reading. I consider myself a strong reader and I find myself often making use of techniques such as the ones Tovani discusses, but I wasn't aware of the names they had before I read what Tovani had to say on the matter. The four voices are the interacting voice, the conversation voice, the reciting voice, and the distracting voice. I often find myself grappling with the distracting voice, usually when I'm tired. The fact that I generally read as I'm in bed may be a contributing factor. Of course, this predilection for wandering thoughts is what makes my job as a cartoonist possible. When I'm well enough engaged with a text, the other three voices make themselves known.
What's difficult for students, as Tovani recognizes, is that reading ability is its own sort of positive feedback loop. What I mean by that is that students who struggle to read are less likely to read more and thereby will fail to become better readers. However the opposite is also true--students who are good at reading are more likely to read more and thereby become better readers. It is a self-reinforcing system that we as teachers need to steer towards the latter rather than the former. By the time students end up in middle school or high school, they may have decided, either subconsciously or otherwise, that the content is either too difficult or too boring to even attempt. As Luke (in the book) said, "When I get stuck, I quit reading." It becomes necessary for teachers to make reading into something that's engaging and fun so as to avoid students utilizing online summaries or asking friends for what happened in assigned readings. We need to give students the tools to succeed. We can throw up our hands and say that "you can lead a horse to water," but we have the ability to give them a big ol' straw, too.

edTPA - extremely daunting Teacher Preparation Apparati

I'm a senior in my education program. I've written a few TPA lesson plans by now, and I've got a trembling grasp on how to create lesson plans. I do as the artist does and recycle those parts of previous lesson plans of which are renewable. And yet there are still parts of the lesson plan that I end up not "getting." Practice makes perfect, I know, but no amount of practice will make the edTPA less daunting, less looming and sinister somewhere in the middle-distance of my educational career. With the addition of the guidelines on Dr. Agriss' blog, they help ease some measure of burden, but as a college student with a separate-yet-parallel adult life full of bills, parenting, debilitating chronic insomnia, and finding time to regain composure between teetering bouts with psychological breaks, my shoulders are chapped and my back is weary. I skimmed through the edTPA's "Making Good Choices" document, a full 40 pages of tips and tricks for the discerning heavy-lidded eye, and decided that maybe it's worth weeding through with a comb of finer teeth so as to perhaps glean some extra burden-lifting advice for completing my edTPA.

I'm the kind of guy who doesn't study for a test and still gets a solid 85-90 percent. I wade ankle-deep into my textbooks and pull out with 4.0 GPAs consistently. But the edTPA? The edTPA scares me. In these waters there be monsters, and to defeat them, I must wade further.

When it comes to my lesson planning, I find that what I need the most help on is the use of academic language, and figuring out how to use formative assessments in practice. Writing down theses assessments is all well and good, but to put them to use in the classroom is a whole separate bag of cats, especially considering the other task-juggling required. I know firsthand that teachers in the classroom don't put together lesson plans for each day of instruction, and I imagine that helps once the monster has been vanquished, but before then, I cannot reliably fall back on shortcuts to get me through the edTPA. I've got to buckle down and strike true.

Social Justice - Not Just for the Cool Kids

"What is Social Justice?"

I think it's fair to assume that we live in a society, and within that society we expect each other to follow certain rules. Not necessarily laws, because laws are not necessarily just simply for being laws. It's more like an unspoken shared morality based on the society and its interactions with the individual. In many cases it exerts itself through laws, chief example being the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished segregation, banned employment discrimination on the basis of personal, uncontrollable traits such as race, gender, nationality, et cetera. So when we talk about Social Justice, we're talking about the defense of those who are not being adequately given the equity or equality they deserve in our collective communities. Social Justice isn't a recent notion - The Black Panthers of the Nixon era, the women's suffrage movement, and plenty of others. These days it shows up as Black Lives Matter and as opposition to the white supremacists who were emboldened after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Now as to why it is important to our classrooms, how a child is educated is indicative of how they will engage with and think about the world around them. If education's goal is to shape the methods in which students think, then it stands to reason that certain conclusions can be arrived at when valid models of thought are entertained. For example, if in a classroom (now or elsewhen if that's a word) a teacher doesn't build up a student's ability to empathize with their neighbor and reinforces that with an idea that some people are inherently "superior" to others, then it's not a far jump to arrive at the notion that this student may have some morally flawed ideas about the people around them.
The easiest way to combat this sort of wayward breach of cognition is to stress equality, equity, and empathy, and that someone shouldn't be forced into unpleasant situations because of their race, economic class, religion, nationality, first language, gender identity, sexual preference, and so on. We owe our students the ability to live full lives, and that comes from education.


EDIT AFTER THE FACT: The initial blog post I'm responding to didn't mention finding sources. I thought this was about personal opinion on the matter.

Shakespeare - An Urban Rap

In chapter "Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom," Duncan and Morrell place high importance upon pop culture as a source of education for urban students. I find myself thinking back to my EDUC 413 class, where it was driven into the heads of myself and my other wet-eared educational counterparts that any source of media is considered a "text." Duncan and Morrell push this idea even moreso, postulating that a text doesn't have to be explicitly created for the sake of education to be considered "educational." What they insist is that classroom instruction should avoid being the iconic Ferris Bueller's Day Off scene in which a monotonous Ben Stein lectures about the Holly-Smoot Tariff Act while his students stare blankly into the middle-distance. Well, they don't say that explicitly, but that's more or less the idea. What they think we ought to do as educators is make our instruction engaging and relevant to the interests of our students.

My personal philosophy on pedagogy is that students who are having fun in the classroom are succeeding. What I mean by that is that games should be woven into instruction as much as possible so as to maximize the rate of retention while simultaneously making sure that appropriate standards are met. With the added information from Duncan and Morrell, I can expand my idea of what "fun" is, by bringing in pop culture and the immediate interests of my students into the fold. It goes without saying that such a practice will require being more in touch with youthful perspectives so as to create an environment that isn't "trying too hard," and instead creates a classroom culture that is savvy and relatable. By bringing in appropriate popular music (the tastes of which will vary from class to class), movies, television shows, youtube channels, and the like, I can help construct this ideal classroom culture.

Book Talk - Ender's Game

Below is a link to the powerpoint I will be presenting in class.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1I7-lEom67MQa6XK2VHFFK4EubdKk61VG

Teaching is a Breakfast Sandwich

I understand this excerpt from Paulo Freire's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is from 1993. I understand that it has been separated from us by a degree of time and a few turns of the hourglass. But I'm not sure I agree inherently with Freire's assessment of what teaching is. They may be his observations, and I respect that much, but it seems to me that he is applying a pessimistic realism to the "ideal" pedagogical practice, or at least his summation of what others think it to be.

What he's describing is direct instruction, and while that shouldn't be the catch-all marmalade that we spread on our teaching toast, it shouldn't be by-and-large tossed out. This breakfast spread still has some time on the ol' expiry date.

What we as educators need to understand is that we cannot rely on a single mode of instruction to reach all of our students effectively. We have to mix and match. Pair that marmalade with, I dunno, maybe some rye toast and a rasher of bacon. Every now and again swap the marmalade for peanut butter. Instead of relying wholly upon direct instruction, we need to mix it up, is my point, the roundabout way of getting there notwithstanding. Constructivist theory is all the rage these days, but it cannot and should not be a wholesale replacement for direct instruction practices. They need to be mixed and matched to better attend the needs of our respective classroom cultures, and the needs of our individual students.

What's more, it is in my opinion that Constructivist theory should follow direct instruction. Mustn't we teach definitions of vocabulary words before students write them? Shouldn't we deliver the Pythagorean Theorem and drill it into memory before we can expect them to know how to apply it?

I think it's necessary to build up a knowledge base first before trying to do anything practical with said knowledge. We have to give our students the necessary components--the eggs, the cheese, the marmalade, the sausage, and the English muffin--before we can expect them to build a delicious and nutritious sandwich from it. Education isn't a transfer of information like water from kettle to cup. It is the presentation of information and encouraging its practical use. Teaching is a breakfast sandwich.

Teaching Literature: Subjective Versus Objective

In the handout we were given in class, the author takes a long, verbose scenic route to describe two truths to literature and how to consume it. We, as teachers, have to identify when to test students upon these two truths of preference and the type of text, or, to put it differently, how we read it. What's important about a text? The objective facts of the writing itself? The main character lives in Florida, his name is Paul, the antagonist is his older brother Erik (Tangerine by Edward Bloor). Or do we worry about the subjective analytical details? The "zombie" in the beginning of the book - what does it symbolize? What is the dynamic between Paul and his parents? What factors contribute to Paul's opinion of his older brother? Why is Paul afraid of him?

The point is that when reading a text, or at least a piece of fiction, and when assessing our students, we need to know what we're looking for. Do we want them to understand the text in an objective or subjective sense? Each way is valid for different reasons, and you'd be ill-advised to use a test meant for interpretation (essays, discussion) for objectivity, just as you'd do a disservice to the students by using a fact-based assessment to glean the students' understandings of subjective ideas.
The article (textbook?) offers some helpful tips to narrow down what you're looking for and how to employ techniques to weed those sorts of sought answers from your students. As teachers, we ought to understand the difference between black/white/yes/no questions and open-ended ones. It shouldn't take ten textbook pages for us to be able to make the distinction. What should be focused on is how to approach that distinction so that our students can understand it, and know when the expected answers are Boolean or wide-reaching.

CA CCSS

In spite of the fact that these standards are "for grades 11-12 unless otherwise specified," and I am currently placed in a 7th grade classroom at a local middle school, there are some bits that I can likely scale back for use with students who haven't quite yet developed their critical thinking and analysis chops. It's nice that the CA CCSS is written in an accessible way, as it makes slight modification easier. Although the odds of needing to do this are slim to none, given that 7th grade already has its own CCSS to which I must adhere. That being said, however, some of the techniques and other tidbits may be useful in a preparatory sense. What I mean by "preparatory" is that my students will have to grapple with questions such as the ones listed under the "Reading for Understanding" heading, where they are thinking more metacognitively about what they are reading. If I can pose these questions a few years early and sort of plant that seed of inquisitive pedagogy, it stands to reason that I can soften the blow when similar questions make themselves apparent in later grade levels, easing the difficulty curve and potentially impressing their future teachers with their analytical skills. One of the parts of reading that I see older students struggle with is comprehension of what's read, and the aforesaid section helps with that skill, I think.

As a whole, though, I like how the standards are structured in such a way so as to complement each other. Reading and writing are so closely intertwined (reading a lot creates better writers, and writing a lot creates better readers) that using standards to leverage that relationship only makes perfect sense. Separating writing and reading (and speaking, if you ask me) is an exercise in futility, one that results in the inability of students to relate to a text, discuss it adequately, and form intelligent responses, be it in writing or otherwise.

CCSS - Standards, Not Curriculum

What I found interesting about the chapter titled "The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts Instruction in Grades 6-12," which is from the book titled CCSS: Origins, Goals, Challenges, is the fact that the standards (and even the notion of how to address and define standards) are a whirling machine, always changing and re-orienting themselves. The struggle between federal and state standards, the differences from state to state, and the challenges therein, create a complicated whirlwind of politicking, coercion, resistance, and cooperation--a process that seems to be antithetical to the means it aims to achieve. It appears that Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are the latest and most effective (considering widespread use in the States) in this long train of reinventing the wheel, as it were, but how long before the work that so many have put into these standards is discarded and the wheel turns again, finding new ways to complicate matters in the name of blanketed inclusion and ironic efficiency? Now, I don't mean to imply that inclusion or efficiency are negative things--quite the contrary. My issue stems from the fact that we don't stick with one "machined part" long enough before trying to dissect it and find a better way to accomplish the same task. And while it may be a byproduct of scientific inquiry (the standards we hold most dear are research-based, after all, and the scientific method demands and necessitates redefinition of observations) as well as a byproduct of the simple march of time (politician A enacts policy, policy is put into effect for a short term before politician B takes his place and enacts a new policy, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum), but it seems to me that we owe our species the apt investment it deserves.

I of course imply that education is the most important investment a people can make into itself. If we do not hold education to be the positive feedback loop that it is and tend it just so, then we are remiss in our duties to future generations. If CCSS is the best we have, then so be it. But when the next iteration of some form of educational standards rears its inevitable head, perhaps more care should be poured into its creation, with more cooperation and less politicking, than generations before; simply because we owe it to ourselves and our children and our children's children.

To clarify, I don't dislike CCSS. I only wish that it met more needs of more varieties of children (every child is different, you know) while simultaneously holding all students to an acceptable standard. And that may be an idealistic pipe dream, but even so, we must strive for that dream.

Discussion as a Way of Teaching - a Response

What strikes me (although at this point in my educational career, it really shouldn't) about the reading is that we have to pay equal mind to the form, function, and features of discussions as much as to what is discussed. As with any teaching method, the form and function need be tended before the content within can be adequately transferred. Students who aren't engaged or who don't feel included will be negatively impacted by the exercise at hand. It's true for day-to-day classroom instruction, and it's true for class discussions. I like that the author presents a wide variety of possible discussion formats, allowing us, the audience and prospective teachers, to pick and choose what will work depending upon our class compositions, relevant course material, and the needs of the students.

As a prospective English teacher, myself, discussion is imperative to pushing students to think about what they read critically. It allows me as a teacher to model what critical thinking looks and sounds like, and encourages participation by putting the students all on an even playing field. The whole reason I had opted to teach Secondary students was for the opportunity to explore deeper concepts, read between the lines, and pursue more difficult or mature subject matter. You can't expect a third-grader to sit and have a discussion with you about the importance of foreshadowing in To Kill a Mockingbird. However, getting into highschool, students have the developed mental chops to take a bite out of more abstract concepts and link otherwise nakedly unrelated ideas. While language is the lynchpin of communication, it, by association, becomes a lynchpin for understanding humanity, and opening the doors to explorative thought. How can a student hope to put their complicated thoughts and complex feelings into words if the importance of language isn't stressed? With this notion in mind, it becomes apparent that practice makes perfect, and it follows that open, explorative (yet directed) discussion chips away at the granite of linguistic ignorance and therefore the slate of real, honest thought. Poetic, I know.