English 1539 (Friday, Sept. 9)

What I Observed:

Because of Monday’s holiday, I came to Nichole Lucas’ English 1539 class on Friday. Nichole began class by letting one of her students choose the “song of the day.” The student (or the “teacher for the day”) chose Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” while the guided writing prompt she came up with for her fellow classmates was as follows: Listen to this song and relate it to how you feel about your English 1539 class. I thought that this was a great way to make her students more excited about writing and allow at least one student each day take on a more active role in the classroom. Nichole then explained in great detail some upcoming assignments, including Monday’s Malcolm X reading (which students are required to pick out five vocabulary words from). For the remainder of class, Nichole discussed some information necessary to write the first major assignment, which is due on Sept. 30.

What I Learned:

I particularly liked the way that even though she presented a lot of information in a short amount of time, Nichole didn’t seem to overwhelm her students. For instance, most of Friday’s class was devoted to an explanation of descriptive writing. One key point of this lesson was that descriptive writing relies heavily on describing the five senses. Nichole started with a sentence — “I walked across campus” — and asked her students to elaborate on it by further detailing what they saw, smelled, tasted, heard and felt on this walk. During this activity, in which Nichole typed their responses on the screen, the students seemed interested and engaged. In fact, at the end of class, I heard one student say, “That really helped a lot.” It was a fairly simple, straightforward activity, but, sometimes, the most helpful lessons are the simplest. She also talked about the episodic narrative and suggested that her students think of it as a “sugar cone,” which must be guided into a specific, narrow event. This was a fun, easy way for her students to remember that information.

COMMENTS:

* Guy Shebat: You are seeing (from Nichole) some good strategies to employ -- not only in 1539 but, in slightly modified form, in 1550.