A guaranteed speed breaker when I enter a new school year, and meet a new batch of students with renewed enthusiasm is old errors. Do it enough over the years, and you might begin to realize that part of an old-timer’s stoicism in the face of annoying errors lies in foreseeing obstacles and being ready for them as opposed to being taken by surprise.
More importantly, however, the book blurbs and the discussions that followed served as excellent book talks. After each lesson, I saw students quietly picking up many of the books on the slides. I pretended not to look, of course.
I didn’t give them the definitions in the beginning this time. This allowed them to use the learning from the last two lessons and hypothesise what the differences ought to be. The book blurbs on the slides, much like last time, were our opportunities to discuss, argue, ask questions and share our confusion. Towards the end, when clarity was just within reach, I provided the definitions.
My main aim in this lesson is to get students comfortable with identifying boundary conditions of a genre in the face of ambiguity.
moving writers 