Mary K. Donahue
I am not striving to have my students focus on simple grammar mechanics and the fundamentals of reading. Instead, I want my students to focus on interpreting difficult texts and analyzing the impact these texts can have on their own lives. This unit is about getting your students to think more about who they want to be as individuals, and allowing them to realize some of the constraints we have due to the real or imagined presence of society. Some of the questions asked in this unit will be: What is the difference between society and community? When a certain outlook on life is marketed to us how can we expect to develop individuality? What is the importance of choice?
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We will first spend time reading and analyzing the literature of the mid-1800’s. Then we will focus on studying paintings in three different categories: those that depict the individual; those that demonstrate society as a conformist realm; and those that depict society as a group made up of individuals acting on their own. The paintings that I have chosen for this unit are not constrained by either time period or location. Also, please keep in mind that although this unit contains art, it is being used as a vehicle for studying and understanding the world at large. This unit does not make any claims to being an in-depth study of art. Therefore, the paintings will be presented to the students without background information on the artists or their body of work, unless it becomes dire to the lesson. We will compare them to both prior beliefs, and themes we see in our reading. Every student must learn the fundamentals of language and communication, which is why English is a requirement for every year in high school. Text on a page can be something very transient for a student to grasp and internalize. After surpassing the original goal of getting the students to comprehend the basics of the material, the real work of inviting them to understand it in the context of their own lives begins.
One of the areas that I feel aids a lot of students in the classroom is visuals. Visualizing things one their own is something that I’ve found my students struggle with a great deal; however, they can work with tangible visuals very well. Aside from diagramming essays and parts of thought, it can be very difficult to incorporate this level of intelligence into a unit so dense with philosophical thought. I plan on bringing together the skills that students use to read and understand text with visual pieces that can mirror some of the topics that we are dealing with in the writing, and thus further their understanding and analysis of both. The ability for students to view and analyze a piece of art as well as they can a piece of literature will prove invaluable both now, in my class, and in the future.