Insults and Puns: Saving Shakespeare

This has been an incredibly long week, and I have to say that even though I devote a number of hours to blogging, reading and posting, I was grateful to have this as an outlet for the kids as we made our way into a new unit. Without my really suggesting it, students blogged in the evening as a follow up to class activities, and it is wonderful to read posts and comments to gather feedback on what works and what needs attention. One kid called my lesson on puns, "punts."

We started Monday with a freewrite question on how courage ties in with all we've done so far this year. A paper yet to be completed (due Monday) sprang from that and an exercise on RAFTS. I'm thinking about posting some of these - or all or most-to the blog, but I'm wondering if I should create a separate blog for papers which could be linked to each class so that it isn't too much to read through. I'll get Keri's opinion, but discussing it in class, it looked like that might be a solution.

I also put out fires this week...we had some "flaming" in first block stemming from a political commentary on the war in the Middle East...interesting indeed, but by the time several comments went back and forth between two bright bloggers, one of the bloggers reduced the debate to a flat out name calling event and thus, once again, I was faced with the teachable moment, which ended in Zawoof deleting several of his final comments. Silly Pink was asked to document his statistics instead of just throwing them out there just for the sake of argument, and I see he did, but I wish he would have followed proper blog etiquette and linked us to his source. We'll discuss this. (I have to add that I talked to GoldenX3 before school, before anyone came in class, and I asked her to talk about the long blog exchange between she and Zawoof, and she said that it was academic and interesting at first, and then she felt that it turned immature and insulting at the end. This confirmed what I had thought, so I thought I'd talk to him in class.) I told them both that connecting was awesome and having differences and sharing them is what it's all about, but they must always respect each other, and it's hard to tell on the blog when people are kidding, etc. The whole class got in on this part of the conversation, and they agreed that it is hard to tell when someone is sarcastic or kidding, so bloggers need to be careful.

I loved it when my second block class came in and someone turned to Soccer Dude (obviously they knew his pseudonym) and told him he was famous when they saw his link in my daily blog, posted and up on the projector. I need to do that more often.

In third block I mentioned Chou Chou's link on a Shakespeare workshop and I saw her sort of blush, so I'll have to link this one too...and any others as time goes on.

I moved Water Works to a chair by herself and the other bloggers from her old table seem much happier.


I'm hoping that reading the play in class and following up occasionally with the blog as a way to wonder and reflect about what it all means will help kids who seem to struggle. Amazingly, students are mostly enthusiastic about the language and drama. I was so happy that in each class there were more than enough volunteers for reading, and they did amazingly well.