Reflection on Assignment 1

Discuss your planning process for Assignment 1, and what some of your biggest concerns or areas of focus were.

What took the most thought? Typically when 11th graders read something by Zora Neale Hurston, they read Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is arguably her masterpiece. I wanted to give them some that Hurston wrote while she was still working to become the master writer she became; moreover, in this transition period, she was part ethnologist and part writer, and it is these dual roles that make her book Barracoon both interesting and flawed. When Hurston was sent by her college professor to write an article on the last survivor of the last slave ship, she had difficulty getting enough information so she plagiarized the piece. She had a second chance and this tie took copious notes, but there is significant academic debate about how much she shaped the story of her subject. So how to get my 11th graders not only to see the differences in Hurston’s agenda, but to be able to recognize when the piece was actually a shaped narrative even as it was pretending to be a accurate transcription of someone else’s history. Of course the standards are clear enough in terms of singular skills. The test was to come with the analysis coupled with evaluation.

What was challenging? Balancing the need for a deep dive into academic evaluation with facilitating student enthusiasm. This is why I decided to include as a capstone assignment a collaborative assignment for the students in which they were to develop a dramatization of a key scene from the text. Often seeing the text come to life like this illuminates some of the hidden meanings I was hoping we would uncover.

Briefly describe your outcomes. I felt good about the lesson plan at this point as it really seemed to provide me and the students with a usable framework for accomplishing our overall goals.