A Thought on Lectures

As I prepare to become a teacher, I find myself reflecting more and more on my own learning experiences. I think of the strategies that worked and those that bore me and my classmates to near-tears. A strategy that rarely worked for me during my education is a lecture. In Bridging English, Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (MM&M) acknowledge lectures as one of four organizational structures for class time. Even though I loved school, I had many reasons for hating lectures.

Lectures meant blankly staring at the board and taking mindless notes. My teachers hoped that I was engaging with the text and thinking about it, but in reality I was thinking about lunch or passing notes to my friends. When I have something to work on or need to focus, I am not easily distracted, so I can only imagine that other people in my class were daydreaming too. Lectures were not only interesting or engaging, but they were old. I had at least one teacher who wrote the same notes on the board every year. She may have even used the same yellowed notebook papered ones as her originals. I don’t know if it’s necessary to explain what most students did:

“Hey Leah, do you still have your notes from American Government?”

It’s probably easy to conclude that I have a hard time accepting lecture as a positive learning experience. However, the claim of its importance in the classroom has caused me to, yet again, reflect on the possible value of lecturing. As I explained, for me lecture was a process of “Here’s a fact, write it down in your notebook and memorize it. There’ll be a test at the end of next week.” From a student’s perspective, no good. From a teacher’s, an easy way out.

What I found interesting from MM&M are the included rhetorical strategies to make a lecture memorable: analysis, definition and classification, comparison and contrast, and illustration. These go beyond the list of facts and regurgitation. That’s what initially caught my attention, and I continued to think about the benefits of a lecture structured in these ways. Essentially, lectures become teacher-think-aloud opportunities. It’s a chance to show students what their goals are when interacting with subject matter. We can show them how to make comparisons between two texts or from text to self or how to analyze Shakespearean language in a single sonnet. This becomes the first step in scaffolding: students observing. After they have seen it down, they can perform the task with some guidance and eventually they will be able to use the new skill on their own.

The work of MM&M has opened my eyes to the positive possibilities of using lecture in the classroom, as long as it’s done correctly. Students need to be interested, not given a list of facts.

A Book Review & Author Talk: Breakfast with Buddha & Roland Merullo

Today, Roland Merullo came to my university's campus to attend several classes and to read to the public this evening. For those who don't know the work of Merullo, he is the author of 15 books, and his most well-known novel is Breakfast with Buddha.

I first read Breakfast with Buddha as part of my Honors Colloquium last fall semester. Many passages from this book hit home for me, as a college student not fully sure of my independent self, because I could relate to the main character, Otto. This specific course focused on Buddhism in the modern world, so my professor emphasized that we were "on a journey" with Otto and Rinpoche throughout this novel.

For those who have not read this novel, I highly suggest it. If you have read another book by Merullo and disliked it, still pick this one up to try. When he came to speak to the current Honors Colloquium (the professor invited the "alumni" from last year to this session), Merullo talked about how his publisher and editors would prefer for him to write in a similar style continuously, but he says he can't. So if you've read another title by Merullo and wasn't a fan, still take a step into Otto's journey with a Tibetan monk.

I hadn't really considered being able to teach this specific novel in a class because the plot and theme central so much on a spiritual issue. Despite the literary value of this text, I feel as if I would have a difficult time justifying teaching Breakfast with Buddha in a public school. Would I enjoy it if I had the opportunity? Absolutely. However, that might not happen.

While in a question and answer session with Merullo, I was introduced to some of his other books that I would be able to consider as educational texts in a classroom (now I must read them!). The first is a story of a girl with cystic fibrosis, called A Little Love Story.

 Though I haven't read this novel (but I will!), I relate it to the novel Petey that I observed taught in a sixth grade classroom. The main character of that novel goes through many difficulties as a misdiagnosed patient who isn't treated very well. I wonder if Roland Merullo's A Little Love Story couldn't be a text to teacher students that though some people have physical disabilities or constraints, they are still human beings with emotions and dreams.

Banned and Challenged Books

I spent my Thursday night at a Banned (and Challenged) Books Reading that I emceed. The event was hosted by my university's English Honor Society. Afterwards, a reporter from our school's student ran newspaper asked me a question:

In your opinion why is it important to read banned books?

Most banned books have a wide audience and are popular, so I personally read banned books for their literary contributions. 


I am a little disappointed in my answer, because in my Methods course of teaching Middle School English, we just finished our assignment on reading and teaching banned and/or challenged books in our classrooms. Our assessment was to write a one page rationale, with a summary, and a letter to parents of our hypothetical class.

My chosen YA novel was Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes.

Kevin Henkes’ Newbery Honor Book, Olive’s Ocean, portrays twelve year-old Martha’s emotional coming of age story that resonates with relatable experiences for early teenagers. The fast paced young adult novel begins with Martha receiving an excerpt of a journal from a classmate, Olive, who tragically died in an accident a month earlier. Though these two girls did not know each other well, Martha discovers shared interests from the single entry of Olive’s journal. Martha and her family leave their Wisconsin home the next day to visit the ocean home of Godbee, Martha’s grandmother, and Olive haunts Martha’s thoughts as she experiences the dynamics of family relationships, the stirrings of teen romance, and the concept of mortality.

For those who haven't heard of this novel, it was on ALA's Top Ten Challenged Books in 2007. Since then it has dropped from the Top 10, but is still considered in the Top 100 of that decade. The reasons it has been challenged include swearing and a scene with sexual references.

For my assignment, I not only read this book, but also extensively researched it. Olive's Ocean has a reading level of 4.8, but the content of dealing with mortality and the reasons of it being banned make the novel more suitable for middle school students than late elementary.

When I read the book, I came across several literary tropes that students can begin understanding in grades six, seven, and eight, while meeting state standards.The literary devices will be easier to access due to the reading level and the characteristics of Martha’s experiences and emotions that middle school students relate to because they deal with similar issues. The issues deemed inappropriate for elementary students can be addressed with middle school students. 

When I answered the question for my school's newspaper reporter, I was trying to encompass as many banned books as I could with my response, and it felt generic but honest. Banned books from The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and today's popular Hunger Games have all faced challenges because of their content, and yet we continue to find ways to use them to teach in classrooms because of the literary merit or popular success they have seen in our cultures.

So short and sweet was a good answer for a question that seems to carry a lot of weight for a wanna-be English teacher.