Holidays!
Teachers sigh with relief for a few days before the preparation for Term 4 begins, new units and resources to develop especially for the first term of HSC. It has been decreed that we all have to teach the same texts for this coming cohort. I have many reservations about this but just have to concur that 'Witness' will be our Module B text. I have not taught this before even though I have written about it a number of times and as such do not a great resource pool to draw on apart from analytical deconstruction I have come up with. Ideas and suggestions for getting students engaged for this text would be appreciated. On a personal level, I find it very dated and cannot see that it is 'distinctive' in a great many ways as an exemplar film text. I am hoping that I warm to it once I get underway. There are so many brilliant films out there to choose from, I always wonder why this one has lasted on the textlist for so many, many years.
I am also busy with Exploring 'Satire', a text that is long overdue with my publishers. It was meant to be published about now but this year seems to have flown with time and energy spent elsewhere. I am finalising he content list and am tentatively looking at a range from Aristophanes up to 'V for Vendetta' as a contemporary political dystopian text. Many of the famous texts would not necessarily work well in the average classroom and so I am trying to focus more on those that students might find more interesting. I do not intend however to focus much on 'The Simpsons' or similar but more on various playwrights and poets. Suggestions of texts that you think work well in the classroom would be helpful.
Fine weather beckons me away from the computer.
Barbara

Term 3 Snapshot

Where has the time gone - last entry in late April?

We seem busier now than at any other time I can remember in over three decades of being in the classroom.

Another Year 12 cohort is about to leave and while shortcomings will always exist; many of them are (at last) making sound preparation for their upcoming exams. Prelim classes are about to begin and so the cycle continues. Technology has however, drastically altered the methodology I use. There is an amazing range of communicative tools now available, a timely reminder our students are from a social media rather than a pen and paper generation.

I will leave you with some words of wisdom from the Bard.

"If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work;

But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come." (King Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene ii)