u/GeneMarie123

I have a teaching demo at a school I would really love to work at. If you are willing to read my ideas and offer suggestions and thoughts, it would be much appreciated!!

I am a veteran teacher and have taught adjunct in a local ed dept as well. I just left a tenured 25 year position due to moving.

This demo is 15 minutes on “Hope is the thing with feathers,” focusing on connotation, figurative language, and word choice and their impact on tone, mood, and meaning.

My plan is to start with a folded note card and ask students to put their name on one side and on the other, answer, “In dark times, what gives you hope?”

Then I will show the scene from Friends when “Joey doesn’t understand quotes” to discuss how any element w of language use - punctuation, capitalization, word, choices, metaphor, etc. all impact the tone, mood, and meaning of a text. For fun, I will ask them to use air quotes to discuss with the neighbor something they “love” about school.

Next, will review the learning targets with a word map that demonstrates them.

I will hand out the text of the poem and have the class conduct a choral reading (drawing on my years of theater direction).

The handout will have instructions about annotating the passage, and for each stanza, writing a sentence of analysis of how the word choices impact mood, tone, and meaning. I will model this process for stanza one and then have students work with a partner to do the same for stanza two or three (each half of class) while I circulate and guide.

Then I will ask for volunteers to come up to the board and share annotations and analysis for each stanza.

I will close by giving students a choice to either answer: Is hope presented as comforting or complicated and to defend their choice with references to the language use, OR to write their own similar extended metaphor for a different abstract idea with a list provided, give a few moments, and have final sharing.

I found a song with the lyrics being this poem that I can play in the background during work time.

I will end with a quick revisit of the learning targets, and then a final “benediction” of what I hope for the students (based on observations of their notes on their notecards, will try to show humor and warmth).

There will be 25 AP 11th students, and the position is for English 10 and 11.

Thank you for any feedback! I need this lesson to be amazingly engaging and well-taught! 😊