Saturday, October 17, 2009

Romantic or Not?

So what do I do now that I have a student teacher? I have plenty of department head work to keep me occupied but I have also been working on my first unit for January. I enjoy second semester's lit the most because its theory allows for more creative presentations. The Romantic period will be where we start. I have been flipping through magazines looking for advertisements that illustrate the theory concepts that I will be teaching. I have a two fold purpose: 1) to find some graphics for the students to analyze on quizzes and 2) to model what I am expecting for a project. So here's a mini-lesson and some illustrations that I found:

William Wordsworth identified 5 principles of Romantic poetry. A combination of these are needed to make a work Romantic. I give the kids the acronym OPENS to remember this concept:

Ordinary & Outcast (focusing on simplicty and every day objects)
Personal Relationship with work (poets writing from their heart)
Exotic and Supernatural (the opposite of O - part of the paranormal or not from England)
Nature (this is the main focus of the period's work)
Spontaneous (all works must be from emotions of the moment rather than study)

The quiz question is which letters of OPENS does this picture support. Answer: O due to childlike fascination with bugs and N since the majority of the picture deals with Nature.

E due to the exotic fruits that do not grow in Europe. I have to specify that the answers must be based on Europe because last year I used a picture of an elephant, forgetting that some of my students live where they see elephants on a regular basis! They kept getting the answers wrong because they would put O since it is ordinary to them. For the project the students will have to find 5 visuals that show different aspects of Romantic theory.