HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH GRADES 9-12

INSIDE THE CLASSROOM:

Morgan Cuffie, Ninth- Grade ELA teacher, The High School for Fashion Industries, Manhattan

In ninth-grade ELA, literary analysis and argumentation are the most important standards I teach. These are the bread and butter of my classroom. My students are expected to examine a complex text and answer questions about the author’s language, structure, and purpose. In every unit, students form a thesis and support their claims with evidence in succinct, persuasive argumentative and literary essays.

During a regular class period, students may closely read a text and use a reading strategy to comprehend and analyze it. One favorite strategy is annotation. Students mark a text as they find key vocabulary words; develop pertinent questions about language, characters, and central purpose; and highlight useful passages for essays or class discussion.

When students can annotate effectively, they get the most out of challenging readings. I’m never prouder than when I get a student’s text back and see it marked all over with a highlighter or colorful pen.

I also try to engage students around the key Common Core standards with creative approaches. To teach students about find- ing a non-fiction text’s central purpose, we use images, photographs, and drawings. Students come up with a central idea for each picture.

Students at The High School for Fashion Industries study art, fashion, and design, and their passion for these topics is a real opportunity. For example, they may write thesis-driven, argumentative essays about the traits of characters in a text, and then design clothing that matches those traits. There are so many creative ways to get students to learn!

Encouraging your child to read, from f ictional YA texts to blogs and online articles, is one of the most important things a parent can do. You can set an example by reading too. Ask your child questions and discuss topics that encourage them to think critically and support claims with evidence — whether it’s talking about the current election or debating about curfew. Finally, parents can support their students just by asking questions about school and attending parent-teacher conferences.

When students see their parents and role models involved in the process, it means a lot.

Classroom task, grades 9-10: Biodiversity in the Coral Reefs

Using a package of 12 texts and two documentary films on the subject of coral reefs, students read, annotate, and reflect to “become the expert” on the topic. Teachers do not lecture, but provide structure that the students use to process challenging materials independently.

As they progress through the texts, students stop to record facts learned from each source in a “knowledge journal” that also requires them to connect new information to specific facts that were presented in the previous sources.

In a separate journal, they record six vocabulary words from each text that most exemplify its central idea. All the selections are at moderate to high levels of complexity, so students will frequently need to research these terms in reference sources.

As a final project, students produce a brief “TED talk,” complete with supporting visuals, to present to the class.

Classroom task, grades 9-10: “By the Waters of Babylon”

This five-day lesson plan guides students through “By the Waters of Babylon,” a 1937 short story by Stephen Vincent Benét about a young man in a primitive postapocalyptic society who learns the truth about the world as it once was. The 22-page tale requires close and patient reading as mysteries are slowly revealed.

After reading the story on their own, students work in small groups or as a class to answer 20 text-dependent questions tied to specific lines and paragraphs. The questions prompt reflection on the story’s setting, tone, syntax, character development, and other important features.

Finally, the students draft, write, and edit a two- to three-page essay about the main character’s journey of discovery and what it tells us about the relationship between knowledge and truth. They must cite specific evidence from the text in support of their conclusions.

Classroom task, grade 11: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Students read the 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” an early feminist literary landmark by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The teacher leads the class through discussion to help them look beyond the Gothic horror of the plot and analyze Gilman’s underlying themes of mental illness and gender inequality in Victorian society.

After re-reading and annotating the text, students create an “evidence chart” to organize the passages that they will cite in an argumentative essay on the theme of marginalization. The essay will include a thematic analysis of the story explaining the significance of the wallpaper and of the woman, or women, that the narrator sees trapped behind its pattern.

To expand the assignment, students read a short text by a medical expert of Gilman’s time. Based on this evidence, they analyze the profession’s prevailing attitudes toward female patients and discuss how they affected Gilman’s personal experience of mental illness

Classroom task, grade 12: Federalist Papers No. 10

This lesson meshes with the Grade 12 social studies curriculum, which focuses on American government, civil liberties, and the rights and duties of citizenship.

The essay known as Federalist No. 10 is essential to understanding the US Constitution and the intent of its framers. In it, James Madison explores the dangers of faction and of majority rule in a pure democracy, and proposes a cure — the republican form of government that the Constitution outlined.

In class, students research the chal- lenging vocabulary of this 230-year-old document and trace Madison’s argument using graphic organizers.

As a final project, they create a chart to organize the evidence he presents to support his main thesis — that factions are dangerous to civil society and good government — and rank these items in terms of their effectiveness and persuasiveness.