Mishapen Muse

The second coming of reform may be due. While Bruce Pirie's text, Reshaping High School English is little outdated by research standards, his call for change does not fall on deaf ears. This book came to me on a whim. So desperately wanting to hang with the big kids in the credential program back when I was a mere undergrad two years from left before the great walk of pomp and circumstance. This was during the time of great educational reform, well before NCLB. Teaching jobs were practically being handed out to college graduates and the upper division courses were filled with enthralling discussions on pedagogy and praxis.

Finally, I took the time to dig into to Pirie's ideas. It falls on the heels of my own thoughts after reading Blogs, Wikis and Poscasts. I've accepted the idea of integrating blogs into my instruction, but given the lack of computers readily available to my own students--the waiting list for the one computer lab set up for both the middle school and high school with only a few spots available at least two months in advance--my only recourse for this to be a regular routine is have students complete the weblog assignments on their own. Those who don't have the luxury to a computer at home would be asked to utilize the computers available in my classroom or the library at lunch or after school. This will cover a portion of the writing activity for the class. But it's the in-class activities that concern me.

Of course, I am planning on assigning in-class writing, be it journaling, in-class essays and short-answer-quizzes, but I cannot deny that there are times when I do worry whether I will have a creative approach to the literature we will cover in class. I can't just have them write the a response after every reading. Not only will such a plan be misconstrued as punishment by students, but it will also kill the literature we are covering. Pirie stresses the use of dramatic work as a means of engaging students with text. Not just plays as the texts selected to read in class, but dramatizing literature that sits flat for many students: "If we're trying to see how verbal language is embedded in nonverbal contexts, then we need to make a deliberate effort to experiment with other ways of knowing and communicating--visceral, physical, large-as-life complements to the 'talk and text' of traditional English" (54). Pirie is suggesting that we don't necessarily use drama as purely a source of entertainment in the classroom when all life seems to have been sucked out by some textual ghost, but find those episodes in a text that demand drama to explicate a text. The use of drama in such cases needs to be continually questioned for its purpose and value to assist the students. Otherwise, it may be equivalent to showing the movie in lieu of the literature itself--a choice so often made by teachers and more often preferred by students. But to what end? Clearly, not to explore the text more deeply.