Shakespeare Rap

13/8

Hmm, last night I made some stir fry and rice, now it had veggies and rice and broccoli and carrots etc so it was very healthy.  Last night.  There was a bit too much for one meal so I covered it and set it aside and was going to put it in the fridge when it had cooled down.  Well I ate the plate and promptly forgot about the left over until this morning when i found it on the stove and put it in the fridge (Silly).  Well I reheated it and I thought I had a great meal, but as I ate it there was a sluggish texture to it..

Not ten minutes later I hurled it all up, plus the contents from lunch.  Luckily I had lots of warning so I made it to the porcelain altar, but wow, did my stomach reject that stuff in a big way, 4 times I went running to the bathroom to hurl.  I could feel the pressure in my eyes my stomach rejected it so bad.  Dumb dumb dumb me..

 8/25

VIF emailed me today, wondering if I had forgotten my login in and password as I had not posted a journal entry.  I hastily put one together and posted it, as follows.

 Motivation, Rap & Shakespeare

I discovered a motivating tool in my 2nd block English class. Now after a month here I am loving it, I took a tough line from the start and occasionally I recite an Aussie ballad and the kids relate to it like Rap.
I had to tell a kid to be quiet by rapping to her today
First I couldn't get a girl to be quiet because she was rapping this song and she wouldn't shut up, so I just started rapping a song back at her and dancing around:
Bridget Bridget, in your seat
shut your mouth
shut your mouth
I told ya once I told ya twice
zip the lip and lemme teach...
I just made it up as I went and the class loved it, they kept asking me to do it again, but they all stopped and listened to me so I could teach them. There are certain rhythms that they respond to well. In fact, I was explaining about Iambic Pentameter to one class in the library and equating Rap lyrics to Shakespearean verse. I showed them how they both had similar rhythms. I asked a student to give me a line from his favourite rap song, then I wrote it on the board and used the short and long lines to show the rhythm, and how it works out the same. Later a visiting teacher who heard me giving the lesson, came and complimented me for showing her another strategy with poetry education. I felt pretty warm about that.

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
I came up with this way of administering the spelling test so they wouldn't have to cheat, and surely the reason we test is that they learn. I put the spelling words on an Overhead Projector and flashed them on the screen for 3 seconds, and the students loved this method. Even one girl who had refused to do any work before, avidly took part in it. When the Department Head came in for her customary observation, and saw it she didn't say anything when I explained that I got the idea from an RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) speed-reading course I did.
Two days later in the middle of a lesson these two other English teachers come into my class, saying the HOD had told them to come and see how I conducted spelling tests, and they're raving about this "new" method I had invented...

I have taken it further now, this week I have put the spelling list into simple sentences and they'll need to write the whole line. I have called it "Sight Read".

About a month on, I have expanded the Spelling test in that I didn't just flash up words but whole sentences this time. I started with the normal vocabulary words and I had decided to put them into pretty simple sentences. The main idea here was to get the students sighting the whole sentence rather than just seeing one letter. So the other words had to be fairly simple as I only wanted them to be exposed to one new word. Of course there was the cacophony of complaints from the students when I only flashed the sentences up for 5 seconds, but most of them managed to get a majority of the sentences down after my giving them a tip on how to read them. At first they tried to write as they looked, but I told them to just look and take in the whole line, then write it once the light went out. By raising the expectations of students, they rose to meet those expectations and most of them turned in good lists of sentences. The next day I flashed it for 4 seconds, and the next 3. Friday I went back to the one-word format again, but Only gave them one second. This is trying to get them to recognise the shape of a word rather than have them spell it out and sound it. This all happened last year, and we started the new school year today, and I am looking forward to working with new strategies.

The Photo was snapped by one of my students during a musical day in May last year. I brought my guitar and played it for us to all have a sing along, I did Aussie Songs as well, as American pop culture ones.