How Do I Get Beyond Acquiring Knowledge and Facts Within My Classroom?

What instantly caught my eye in Teaching Literature to Adolescents was the different notions of learning literature. In my classroom at Mead High School, my master teacher teaches only acquiring facts and knowledge. We are currently reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and the only assessment and learning we do has to do with specific characters, what is happening, and background facts about this idea of racism. We don’t give students an opportunity for the expression of individual open-ended responses. The quizzes are set up as a question and answer response based. The only way they can fail the quiz is if they did not read. After awhile this becomes boring and I can see my students getting bored as well with just lecture based instruction. The trouble I find is how do I make learning more adventurous for these kids so that they can create their own ideas and understanding about the text?

Every Monday and Wednesday my students have a journal entry that they are supposed to write and they have to use a “style file” to spice up their writing. Instead of actually evaluating their journals and reading what they wrote, we grade them upon whether they hit the required page limit and correctly used the style file. I find myself wanting to read their journals and find out more about my students, but due to time constraints and the burden of grading more and more pieces of work it becomes almost impossible. 

I understand my teacher is nervous to give more creativity to his students only because they are so resistant to actually reading the text as it is with an easy 10 point quiz every morning. To read mini essays about their understanding would be tedious and almost unattainable with 60+ freshmen English students and 50 mythology students. The class size makes it impossible to finish grading anything. So my thought process is such: I understand that there is more that I need to do for my students to broaden their education and give them a chance to actually evaluate the text, but how can I do that if they will not read?