Twitter never ceases to amaze me for its ability to come through with exactly what I need at the right moment.  This week my students are studying Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and my colleagues and I wanted to pair it with some modern satire. Though Swift’s text certainly has some shock value (eating babies?! Gross!), it takes awhile to get there and we knew our students needed an on-ramp into that challenging piece of satire.

We wanted something the students would latch onto, but we were struggling to find just the right piece. Satire only works if the reader has the background knowledge to recognize the target. We sifted through a bunch of things and found something we liked well enough, but then Sunday morning, this popped into my feed:

Really?? Seemed too good to be true, but it wasn’t.  It was perfect.  AP Literature teacher Roy Smith (@english_roy) wrote my lesson plan for me without even realizing it.

• • It’s current. It sharply targets recent calls to arm teachers. Even my least aware students know about the proposal to arm teachers.
  • It’s accessible. It is short enough that my students will engage quickly. The list formatting appeals to readers with low stamina. 
  • Its structure mirrors Swift’s.  The opening reels the reader in, there’s a sharp shift to the proposal, and then the argument is laid out logically.

Here’s what I did with it.

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Our school has committed to working on addressing mental health issues with our students this year. Our students are carrying heavy burdens and we–the adults in their lives–need to figure out ways to help them cope with them.  So, when this popped up in my Twitter feed last night, I naturally thought of my students:

Big shout out to @bymariandrew for providing a teaching text yet again!!

It’s not a tough image to understand, but we squeezed quite a bit out of it in 20 minutes of  AP Lang today.

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When I started teaching AP Lang, we did a lot of vocab. I gave a monstrous list of “tone words” and students learned 20 each week. I quizzed them weekly, and then we marched on to 20 more.

It was not good.

Some kids adored it. It was concrete, and they could pad their grades. Other kids?  The subtle differences between the words (apathetic vs. aloof vs ambivalent? yeesh) blew their minds, and they tanked their grades.

I tried some different things–more direct instruction on the words,retakes–and eventually got to a place where they mastered the quizzes, but they weren’t using the words in their writing, or if they were, they were using them in hilariously awkward ways. I knew I was doing it wrong. They needed to be collecting words naturally from their reading and exploring vocabulary in context. So last year, we tossed the lists.

It was (also) not good.

The plan was to have kids find words in their reading and record them in their notebooks so they could build vocabulary more naturally.  A few kids embraced it because they were avid readers and already loved words. But most kids were just kinda ‘meh’ about it. I didn’t have a good way to hold them accountable, and they had no interest in becoming word nerds.

We (the three AP Lang teachers) were all frustrated, but we are trying one more new approach. One quarter of the school year down, and I’m happy to report: it’s good.

What did we do? 

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Last week I started the year with my AP Seminar students talking about perspectives: our own, those of others, and the ones forgotten or ignored in texts.  Much of the success of their research will be dependent on their ability to see issues from multiple perspectives. Imagine my excitement then, when this popped up in my Twitter feed:

This has been happening to me more and more in the past few years, and I’ve found myself pulling materials on the fly from Twitter to use in class.  I even wrote about it here and here last year! This year, my teaching buddy (and fellow Moving Writers blogger) Mike and I are going to do a bi-weekly column called Teaching From My Twitter Feed. We think it will be a good way to keep pushing ourselves to add relevant, current material to our class and help our students see the potential for learning in their own Twitter feeds. Hopefully you’ll follow along as we experiment and share your own #tweaching with us as well! (Use the hashtag if you do. We’d love to see what you do!)

Now, back to that picture. There is so much to unpack both in the image and the caption. I threw the image up on the projector at the beginning of class and said, “What do you think?”  The questions started immediately:

• Is that real?
• What’s wrong with those people?
• Where is that?

Since we were talking about perspectives, I nudged them in that direction a little first. We talked about the perspective of the photographer and the intention of the picture. We talked about the perspective of the golfers. Are they really uncaring monsters who carelessly golf the day away while the wildfires burn? Is there a perspective missing? What would happen if the shot were widened?

Then we talked about research. What did this picture make them want to know more about? Not a single student in my class knew that there are wildfires blazing in the west. They were all shocked because the only weather events anyone is talking about right now are the hurricanes.

Finally we talked about the caption: “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for today, this is the money shot.” Vocabulary alone, this was a winner. Few of my kids knew the meaning of “pantheon” so we googled it. I had to do some explaining because the dictionary definition was not particularly helpful, so it allowed for a quick convo about sophisticated diction. After that, the class was pretty split on “money shot”; some were giggling because they knew the vulgar definition and others simply knew it meant something vaguely like “most important.”  As delicately as possible, we talked about what he meant and his implicit meaning. Was the term “money shot” effective or just crass? Who was he criticizing? Who did the golfers represent? What did the fires represent?

All of this great discussion only took about 15 minutes of class but it showed my students how the things they scroll past can help them think more deeply and critically about the world around them. Could I save this picture and use it next year? Maybe. The discussion about perspectives would probably be largely the same, but it wouldn’t be as relevant or fresh for the students, and I’d miss an opportunity to help them see that there are interesting things all around them to think a little harder about–they just have to stop scrolling for a few minutes.  

The next day a kid came into class and told me that he’d read more about the wildfires online and that it “sounds crazy!”  That was all the confirmation I needed that teaching from my Twitter feed (#tweaching! We’re going to make this a thing!) is a good use of my class time. Sometimes I find something small like this that becomes fodder for notebooks or short discussion; sometimes it’s bigger and transforms a whole lesson. Either way, I think it’s one of the best avenues for keeping my class relevant with my students.

–Hattie

Do you find yourself #tweaching somedays? Connect with us on Twitter @TeacherHattie or @ZigThinks. We’d love to know what you’re up to!