EnageNY, Grade 6, Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 12: In Which We Keep Discussing the Hero's Journey and Compare It to the Original Text

It's like we're doing the same thing! Before we were competing the stages of the hero's journey to The Lightning Thief and writing that on a worksheet. Now we're turning that into an essay.

The one thing I like about this assignment is the checklist. We've seen them earlier, but this is a good idea for writing. Sometimes kids get too focused on one aspect of writing a piece they can neglect other critical parts.

Read the criteria below. Read your partner’s paragraph, keeping this checklist in mind. If your partner meets the criteria, place a √. If your partner needs to revise this because they did not meet the criteria, place a X.

Criteria Checklist:

Did your writing partner ...

_____ begin your paragraph with a topic sentence that makes a claim?

_____ use evidence from The Lightning Thief that supports their claim?

_____ use evidence from “The Hero’s Journey” that supports their claim?

_____ make it clear how the quotes are connected?

_____ close the paragraph with a clear concluding statement? 

Not the worst thing in the world. Of course, the whole thing is designed to help kids write good responses for state tests. This isn't about creating good writers at all but good test takers. However, this is something I can steal for my own lessons on essay writing.

Engage NY, Grade 6, Module 1, Unit 1, Lessons 10–11: A Place Where Nothing Changes

And here we are, two more lessons in, still obsessing about the same list of the hero's journey. This time we are now comparing the journey directly to the text of the book as opposed to quotes from the book on a handout. (Note: I'm going to have to go faster now. Time is a wasting.)

Chapter 11 has a strange addition to the vocabulary list: caduceus. Okay, that's the staff of Hermes, also a symbol of the medical profession. It's not the worst word in the world except that the students have not been taught who Hermes is. Okay, I know that he's mentioned in The Lightning Thief, but there should be a lot more. There are some great myths about Hermes, like his one, when he was born.

I keep hoping that there will be some deep content here, and this unit never ceases to disappoint me.

EngageNY, Grade 6, Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 9: Where We Find A Strange Obsession

Lesson 9 is a bit of a recap of Lesson 8. Now that kids have been familiarized with the steps of the hero's journey, we're now going to be applying it to specific moments in The Lightning Thief. Plus, we're going to learn some new vocabulary words, hero, hero's journey, archetype, uneventful, embark, supernatural, bestow, trials, and ordeal.

Besides the repetition of the term "hero"' I don't have a problem with these except for archetype. It's a very abstract term, and in terms of child development, most children only begin to comprehend things abstractly at about age twelve. This is an example of age-inappropriateness. This is a high school-level term (at least) being brought down into the sixth grade.

Now let's get to one of the most egregious issues with this unit. The homework assignment for this day's lesson is so:

Percy has just survived a traumatic night and is now in a completely unfamiliar and strange setting. This presents a unique challenge. How does Percy respond to this challenge? What inferences can you make based on his response? Consider his interactions with other characters as well as his inner thoughts.

Use your evidence flags to mark places in the text that show your thinking. 

You have a repetition of the concept of challenges. Even though I'm not a huge fan of the book, there are so many things to be discussed at this point in the book, yet we are hung up on the idea of “the hero facing challenges”. Why? Because this is exactly the kind of question that shows up on a test. Trust me. I've seen it over and over again. So rather than discuss mythology, the thing this unit was ostensibly about, it's lasering in on test prep.

EngageNY 6th Grade Module 1, Unit 1, Lessons 7–8: In Which I Find Some (Inappropriate) Content At Last

Unit 1 Lesson 7 is a mid-unit assessment. If anybody had any doubts about the poverty of the content here, the questions are 1–2 sentence chapter "gists" (Can we just use the word summary, please?), review of the challenges Percy faces and the review of the character stuff from earlier. No explicit instruction in mythology.

Lesson 8 actually gets to an interesting point, although a strange one. After discussing what is a hero, which is a fine discussion — I do that too, we go over a shortened list of Jospeh Campbell's “The Hero's Journey” and the process a person becomes a hero? I have to say that this subject appeals to my nerdy little heart, but I have some reservations about the appropriateness of this for early middle school. Joseph Campbell is pretty heady stuff. It's some of the most interesting analysis out there in terms of myths and their structure.

Here's the rub: what good is it learning the steps of a hero's journey when you don't have the content knowledge? The handout wisely uses some movie and book examples the kids might recognize, but I'm still uneasy at pushing this advanced material. What good is it now? Seeing these steps in The Wizard of Oz or The Lord of the Rings is fine, but this is not what sixth-graders need right now.

You want to give them advanced material? Let them read about the Trojan War. There you have the greatest war poem ever telling how difficult and terrible and glorious war really is. Not only will kids learn about Hector, Agamemnon, Paris, Helen, Ajax, and Menelaus, they'll get a sense of war itself. Here's something with deep content that is directly relatable to modern life. I'm not suggesting kids read The Illiad, but they can hear some of the stories. Olivia Coolidge wrote an excellent book on the Trojan War, suitable for this level. Why not that?

And when the kids get this content knowledge, the hero's journey will make sense. The steps will seem familiar and not something tacked onto a story.

EngageNY G6, Module 1, Lessons 4–5: In Which I Debate Myself About A Word

I'm going through an interesting thought process. I'm finding myself being highly critical of this curriculum, then I question myself when it shows nuggets of improvement. Surely it can't be all bad? After all, New York State spent millions of dollars on this. It's professionally developed! You're being too critical!

Let me describe one thing that is making me uneasy. One of the initial vocabulary vocabulary words for this unit is the word gist, as in to get the gist of. We all know what that means, and I always used it in a slightly informal way. In no way is it a word or term that I would incorporate into a lesson except in a casual way. However, this EngageNY curriculum codifies the word gist into the learning process. For example, in Lesson 4 it asks the students to discuss in their triads, “What is the gist of this action of text?" Now this isn't a bad word to know, but my gut tells me it's way too informal a word to use in this context. This is repeated in Lessn 5 too, describing a certain type of non-analytical reading that students are expected to do (which I think is traditionally called "reading"). We have to get the gist of the chapter or section.

What this is doing is dividing the two types of reading too. There's reading for "gist" and there's the analytic reading which the Common Core Curriculum values more.

Lesson 5 addresses making inferences. Inferences are one of these ideas that I see in every standardized test. There are always questions about inferencing. The gist of the lesson (Ha! I make funny!) is to look at a range of pages and discuss what Percy is thinking at a specific moment and then write down what you learn about Percy as a result of it. Okay, this isn't the worst idea, teaching character and inferencing at the same time. The problem is that we did this last lesson. No matter whether you use evidence flags for the text you want to highlight or not, this is very repetitive.

I'm still not seeing any better engagement with story or the mythological underpinnings of The Lightning Thief. Lesson 6 is preoccupied with teaching prefixes, which is a poor fit for a one-day lesson that has to do with a novel. If you're going to teach this subject, and that's a perfectly valid topic for this age (I teach them myself) do it methodically. End a week or so and work through the major prefixes and suffixes, examining how they change the meaning of a word. You can't skim the topic and convince yourself that you've taught it. It's too deep.

We do some reading comprehension in Lesson 6 where the students, still in their triads, get to pick questions for a question basket which I will distribute to each triad. They take turns drawing questions and reading them, then the entire group searches for text to answer the question. I can see this as kind of fun, and this may be a better way to do reading comprehension from time to time.

As a closing, students will stand back-to-back with a neighbor then turn around and share their ideas about three questions:

0. 1. What is an example of a word that begins with a prefix?

   2. What is an important challenge Percy has faced so far in The Lightning Thief?

   3. What is the most important thing you have learned about Percy so far in this novel? Support your thinking with a specific example from the book. 

Getting back to engaging with the text, do you see how the actual text questions are very general? They don't question a student's understanding very well. So far it seems that there are bigger questions than this at this point in the novel, yet the lesson barely touches them.

Where We Link To Articles About The Common Core

These are worth reading to learn about the genesis and effect of the Common Core:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/17/a-painful-analysis-of-new-common-core-tests-and-the-n-y-results/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/24/following-the-common-core-money-where-are-millions-of-dollars-going/

The second article especially describes where the money for the Common Core comes from.

Bad Way To Do Group Work

In the beginning of the teaching noted for Lesson 3 of The Lightning Thief unit, we get a teacher's note:

• Ideally, students would routinely sit in their triads at the beginning of class. Many discussion, reading, and writing routines rely on this structure. If the class has another seating chart or routine, preview each lesson to determine the best time for students to transition to triads (typically at the start of Work Time). 

What this means is that the unit should be taught with the expectation that students sit in their same groups of three for the entire unit. I can see the advantages and disadvantages of the, but in the long term it's a problem. First off, let's remember these are sixth graders, not high school or college students. They have a great variety of maturity levels as well as very different motivation. In any class you're bound to have kids who don't work hard academically. I question the wisdom of having such small, inflexible groups for such a long period of time. 

In the opening you are elected to do this:

• Read the learning targets:
  * “I can make inferences about Percy in order to understand him as the narrator of this story.”
  * “I can cite evidence from the text when answering questions and discussing Percy’s character inThe Lightning Thief.”

  * “I can follow our Triad Talk Expectations when I participate in a discussion.” 

(Pardon that odd line break in the reading targets above. I'm not good enough anymore with HTML code to figure out the formatting.) I'm struck by how none of these standards are content related. In other words, the goal is to be able to find details and relate them to some general ideas (i.e. Understanding Percy as the narrator) but not to knowing or understanding specific things about the story itself.

Lesson 3 has students go over the first four pages of The Lightning Thief twice: the first time for general understanding, the second to parse specific details in order to make inferences about Percy. Again, we have this repetition of text. It makes a certain sense in order to teach inferencing, but holy cow, this will get boring.

I'm still wondering when we're going to be talking about Greek mythology. Seriously. Not on a worksheet which students are analyzing somehow, but a deep and meaningful discussion of meaning.