Photo Project and Quote Clusters: TGIF

I am taking a quick break from grading because I find my attention wandering. I need a life coach when I sit down to grade, urging me to the finishing line. Anyway, I had a couple things I wanted to talk about which will depart from my normal Friday Cocktail Tidbit routine - sorry, no snazzy tidbits coming from this brain this week. You may remember that I blogged briefly about an extra credit opportunity I offered my students a few weeks ago - the Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster Photo Project. Essentially I wanted them to go around in their normal lives noticing representations of these famous literary characters, to snap a few pictures, and to post a brief observation about that particular representation. I thought it would be relatively easy to rack up the points because it was October and I saw images of the monster and Dracula everywhere. I set this up in Discussion Board on blackboard, so they could see each other's posts. Then I took two example pictures of some items I saw in CVS, as well as a hay bale I saw along the road (painted to look like the monster), and I posted them to the discussion with a brief analysis so that they could see what I wanted.
I only just got to look at them today when I finished grading their mid-term exams - about 7 students participated (it was assigned between a paper due date and the midterm, so a good turnout considering that). And I found myself chuckling over the representations that they found. A lot of them were candy, toy, food items in various big box stores, but some were on the street, in a roommate's magazine, at a friend's Halloween party - places where I can imagine them not thinking about my class and then suddenly whipping out their iphones to capture a good image for this extra credit project. It made me smile. I was also impressed with their brief write-ups. They asked some interesting questions - like why is Frankenstein's monster's skin always green? (it is not this way in the book - he is described more as "sallow"). They also had a field day with the "kid-friendly" representations of Dracula since he is rather grotesque in the novel. There are, perhaps, a few things I would do differently if I assigned this photo project again, but I am pleased with the overall effect. And I know for a fact the students who participated will appreciate the extra credit (which I applied to their mid-term grades),and the others will be kicking themselves.
I also wanted to quickly describe my euphoric night class from last week. I have been having a tough time staying on top of all my obligations (as you can see from my infrequent blog posts), so it was rough dragging myself to my night class this past week. I had designed a new kind of lesson that I have never implemented before, so I was nervous about the results. The upside of this 8 wk night class is that each class period is nearly 3 hours long, so this particular approach would not work as well if the students were pressed for time. The class before I had divided them into 5 groups and provided each group with a "quote cluster" from the novel we were reading. Based on their cluster, each group had to come up with an argument and anti-thesis about the text. That seemed to go well. This time, however, I made each group come up with their own quote clusters based on 5 themes that I wrote on the board. Each group took a theme, found at least 4 quotes in that theme, and then they had to come up with an argument and anti-thesis for their cluster. This was, according to them, much harder, but as I watched them all discussing and flipping through their books, I could not help but get teacher-face - that well known face that teachers get when students are actually learning and applying themselves. I could almost see their brains whirring. Now any type of group work always presents challenges (group dynamics are not always ideal), but they all participated, engaged, and produced work for their group presentation. It was very satisfying. The take-away, I guess, is really that I want them to be able to base their assumptions and arguments on the text itself. Too often they toss off responses to my discussion questions like it is nothing -but suddenly when they have to write about those ideas using the actual text, they freak out and cannot do it. This exercise is attempting to remedy that. I will report back on the results.

In the meantime, it is back to grading for at least another 3 hours - then I will drown my paper blindness in happy hour specials. Have a great weekend!