The teacher was also a coach. It was a planned absence for a sporting event that the teacher know about in advance.
The summer is full of free days. Also, the students had a big project that was due soon. They were mad they had to watch the movie instead of using the time to work on the project.
How about at least leaving a movie with educational value? How about not leaving a movie that is highly historically inaccurate?
Often the regular teacher will leave an inadequate lesson plan because:
Part of being a sub is knowing which of these contingents led to your assignment, and how to deal with them.
Often the regular teacher will leave an inadequate lesson plan because:
Part of being a sub is knowing which of these contingents led to your assignment, and how to deal with them.
In which of these situations would you say it is OK for me to disregard the lesson plan of the regular teacher? And what should I do exactly? What do you think the administration’s response would be to me disregarding the regular teacher’s lesson plan?
Again, you don’t know what happens on all the other days.
Why couldn’t they? I work on a project while the TV is on all the time.
Because a) they won’t watch a boring documentary, so they won’t learn anything AND they will drive the sub crazy and b) no one thinks AKT is historically accurate. My god, our senior class takes a field trip the last week of school to a local Ren Fair. I suppose that’s also warping their brains for life?
In every school I’ve ever been in, as teacher, sub, or student (and I’ve done all three), as long as the kids don’t start any fires or go to the hospital, and as long as you refrain from using ethnic slurs or groping the kids, the administration won’t give a damn. The most that will happen is that if you have a reputation for not following lesson plans, the teachers that care will request not to have you and you will get shuttled more often to the teachers that don’t leave plans, anyway.
So, 2.5, did you want the student to scan, or to recite? You seem to be conflating the two.
Reading your posts, which I’ll probably stop doing, I can’t help thinking that teaching kids how to think would be a good thing.
Not surprising. After all, capybaras are fish. 
I know they watched War of the Worlds with their teacher. That does not even have the claim of being set in historical times.
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Why couldn’t they? I work on a project while the TV is on all the time.
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The project required that they work in groups and talk. There is no way they could have paid attention to a movie while a classroom of 30+ students talked over it. It was hard enough to hear when a couple of students would start talking. Plus, the assignment was to watch the movie, not work on a project.
Not all documentaries are boring. Wasting class time to show historically inaccurate entertainment (and War of the Worlds) is pandering at best. Is it really too much to expect students to pay attention in class?
And the students drove me crazy anyways because they thought the movie was stupid. I can’t say I blame them. If teacher had assigned an educational movie and required an essay exploring the movie, then the students would have had more motivation to pay to attention. The teacher had an opportunity to use the time for education, and he threw it away. Even the students that wanted to learn were robbed of the opportunity.
The are kind of conflated. If you recite the poem properly, you will scan it. If you scan it, you will know how to recite it properly.
So do I. You know this if you read my posts about what I meant by “teaching how to think.”
What part of the fact that he isn’t saying, “Don’t teach kids to think” did you fail to comprehend???
The theme of the OP is: Don’t use the concept of “teaching kids to think” as a cop-out for teaching kids important, useful concepts.
If you are going to criticize 2.5", you might at least get this much right to start. Not that you are alone; one of the more vocal critics in this thread has failed to grasp not only this aspect of what 2.5" said, but has also managed to make assumptions about what 2.5" did that weren’t accurate, and berated the OP on that basis as well. :smack:
Worst part is, this critic is supposed to be able to read the English language, one expects, with comprehension. 
Well, more properly: scanning it will help you understand the meaning of the words, allowing you to recite it accurately. Kind of like how diagramming a sentence can help understand what it is the words are doing, when you aren’t certain.
Having been a substitute teacher for two years before I embarked upon learning how to be a “real” teacher, I can say that all too often the sub-plans are “half-baked.”
But that’s not the point here. The point isn’t that the kids watched a movie (a rather common “gone for the day, sub here I can’t trust to teach” plan). The point 2.5" is making here is that, IF you are going to leave the students a movie, at least make it something that has some educational value. The library no doubt is FULL of perfectly good movies, entertaining ones no less, that aren’t filled with inaccurate historical information. One would prefer that a social studies teacher selected one. I certainly would criticize wasting a whole day on a movie that can’t be finished in the class time allowed, and which fosters inaccurate ideas of the history of the time period. Where in the pedagogy classes did we learn to do that? 
Two days, actually―still didn’t finish it, though.
I thought you were a lawyer.
That’s an excellent question and few administrators will be able to give you a useful answer. Typically they don’t really care. It all revolves around union policies and general practices. It really depends on your school district. Are you unionized? (I hope you are!) But each district has different policies. Each state has model standards. Maybe I’m telling you things that you already know; if so, please forgive me. But if there’s anything that new teachers would like to know, I’m here, and I’m sure many others who know more that I do.
To be quite frank, you’re already displayed a willingness to define the job description of English teachers without any regard to their actual jobs, as well as claiming that something which can happen quite often is impossible. If you’re going to be claiming that scansion aids comprehension of connotation/denotation, you need to provide a cite.
One hit does, however, deal with possible "negative impact[s] of poetry instruction based on scansion, biography, genre theory and formal principles. " I did find this, which has the first page for free and the rest with JSTOR subscription.
Got any cites?
Well, no, it is not. It’s:
‘I sat in on a class for a day or two, in a situation where most teachers don’t leave all that much more than busy work. In that context, I saw something I didn’t like, although I have neither the training nor the knowledge nor the experience to evaluate its efficacy in a pedagogical setting or to put it into a larger context. And at one school, students weren’t as academically successful as the others I saw, but I know nothing about the students, their families, the state curriculum or the individual teachers’ long term lesson plans. But I’m still going to claim that the school is broken. And what do you mean that I have to take other factors into account? Just educate students to my standards even if it isn’t actually possible to do so. ’
You could, of course, respond directly to such a person and even call them out.
As it is, the only assumptions that I remember anybody making were mine. I’ll assume you were trying to rebut my claims. They were based on the assumption that 2.5 understood some of the most obvious basics of pedagogy as this entire thread was started to complain about what the proper pedagogical approach should be.
If you were criticizing me, it’s more than a bit snarky for you to claim that I was reading English ‘without comprehension’… while you’re distorting what 2.5 was actually saying and whether or not his argument even made sense or had any logical/factual support.
Especially since you’re missing the entire context and reason why 2.5’s rant lacks substance and support. Which has been elaborated on, numerous times, on this page alone.
The point, of course, is that instead of possibly humiliating a student and telling him to read again in the ‘correct’ manner, best practices dictate that 2.5 would have taken the time to either A) make sure that the student knew the ‘correct’ method or B) model/scaffold the knowledge/behavior that he was demanding.
You have, as well, stated that you know better than English teachers how to teach English and what they should devote their time to. In fact, you went as far as to claim that if a teacher didn’t teach public speaking, they weren’t “even doing their job”. You went on even further to claim that it was impossible to gain the meaning of a poem without reading it ‘correctly’. You claimed it wasn’t even possible. You used all caps.
When it was pointed out that you needed to know the actual state standards (an English teacher’s job description) before you could claim that an English teacher wasn’t doing their job, and that it was fully possible to understand poetry without reading it aloud as students have done just that… you didn’t respond.
Hopefully you at least plan on defending your claims, retracting the incorrect ones, and engaging with posters with whom you disagree rather than sniping at them using the third person.
It is a poor teacher who couldn’t find educational value in just about anything. Off the top of my head, I could use a movie like AKT to motivate students to get interested in and do research on the social situation of Medieval Europe. I could see a compare/contrast exercise being particularly valuable, especially if students weren’t high achieving to start with.
Hell, even WotW could, with a bit of imagination, be used to connect concepts with, say, the Mongol invasion of Mandarin China. Which isn’t to say that I’d use either in a class, but it’s still interesting that you don’t see how such films could be used in an educational context.
It’s odd that, along with 2.5, you are claiming things about the curriculum that certain teachers have developed. And you are doing so, based on nothing more than snapshots.
In the part where we’re taught that getting students viscerally interested is the best way to get them into a subject, that even comic books can easily be used as ‘text’ and properly exploited by a talented teacher and that learning is most often a process of acquiring new information and being able to link it to and build upon prior knowledge.
In short, in the hands of a talented teacher, invading Martians who are destroyed by our biological climate can quite easily serve as a bridge to concepts of an invading and unbeatable Mongol army that was essentially defeated by the very culture of the group they crushed militarily.
Just as an example.
As long as I’m providing links, here is a PDF via ERIC.
Literature and the Making of Meaning.
While it is not a peer reviewed article, it certainly does clearly elucidate a pedagogical strategy which is sound and supported. Readers should also notice that the teacher’s planned course of instruction begins in a manner that is very similar to the one that 2.5 has classified as a waste of time.
The point I’ve been making for a while is that in context, even an exercise like having students read poems and write down their gut reactions to them, can be extremely valuable in an educational context.
Less thorough is this piece. It still, however, points out that a guided reading strategy, which does not even touch on scansion, can be perfectly capable of giving students insight into meaning and usage.
These, of course, are just a smattering. My days of plowing through 200 pages of documents in order to support a point are behind me. Or at least, left by the wayside until my job or boredom compel me.
I’m not that bored.
I think I will design a course where the students watch episodes of Alfto help understand the importance of respecting someone from a different culture.
Meaning is only a small part of poetry (or any literature). Their is also the form, sound, rhythm, presentation, etc.
These students (seniors with less than 30 days left) have gone through their entire school careers (most of these students will not be going to college) without the basic skills to even begin to think about things that are basic to the aesthetic power of poetry.
Poetry is blending of meaning and form. Poetry is not a code―just as important as what the poet is saying, is how he is saying it.
I have no problem with students working directly with the text. They should do this; however, these students lack the skills to do so. Before a person can try to understand and internalize verse poetry, he has to be taught the skills necessary to think about verse poetry.