UTL 640E, Haug Pflugerville High School/PISD Date of lesson: March 5, 2014

Molly Whiting AP English IV/12th grade Lesson Plan #2/Teach #3

Madness and Metaphors

Lesson Objective: After reading and discussing an excerpt from Don Quixote as a whole class, students will work in small groups to analyze a set of poems (one per group) and create a two-minute presentation about how they reached their interpretation of the poem in order to better understand how metaphor may be employed to affect readers' perspective.

Resources/Materials: A. To Do Before: a. Read excerpt of Don Quixote and selected poems multiple times for familiarity. b. Identify potential questions/confusions students might have. c. Generate a list of questions/talking points for whole-class discussion. d. Make handouts of texts for students. B. Needed on the Day of Lesson: a. Handouts for students b. Notes with questions/discussion topics to refer to c. Notecards for students' evaluation of lesson during closure TEKS: From 110.34 English Language and Arts and Reading, English IV (3) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Poetry. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of poetry and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to evaluate the changes in sound, form, figurative language, graphics, and dramatic structure in poetry across literary time periods. (5) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Fiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of fiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. (14) Writing/Literary Texts. Students write literary texts to express their ideas and feelings about real or imagined people, events, and ideas. (B) write a poem that reflects an awareness of poetic conventions and traditions within different forms (e.g., sonnets, ballads, free verse) (24) Listening and Speaking/Listening. Students will use comprehension skills to listen attentively to others in formal and informal settings. (26) Listening and Speaking/Teamwork. Students work productively with others in teams. Students will continue to apply earlier standards with greater complexity. Students are expected to participate productively in teams, offering ideas or judgments that are purposeful in moving the team towards goals, asking relevant and insightful questions, tolerating a range of positions and ambiguity in decision-making, and evaluating the work of the group based on agreed-upon criteria.

UTL 640E, Haug Pflugerville High School/PISD Date of lesson: March 5, 2014

Molly Whiting AP English IV/12th grade Lesson Plan #2/Teach #3

Steps in Lesson: A. Engagement--5 minutes Establish the connection between my lesson and the work they have been doing in their current unit on Hamlet. o Open with a question: ! Can someone summarize for the class what happened in Act Two of Hamlet? o After students have broached the subject of Hamlet's "insanity," initiate a discussion about the nature of insanity in general. ! How do we decide that someone is insane? ! Do you think that sometimes society deems people insane just because they see the world differently from the majority? Ask if anyone can make a connection to another famous literary character of dubious mental stability (there are lots that they could reference: Macbeth, Lear, Mrs. Rochester, Madame Defarge, Dean Moriarty, the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, Dr. Jekyll, the characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Esther Greenwood... wait and see what they come up with!) o If a student has not thought of Don Quixote as a comparably "mad" fictional character, introduce him to the conversation and assess students' prior knowledge of this text. B. Stated Objective--1 minute "Today we are going to be looking at an excerpt from Don Quixote; as we do, think about this idea of madness and how the author presents the character of Don Quixote to us. After we discuss the excerpt as a class, you will break up into small groups and each group is going to look at a different poem that presents a subject in very odd and unconventional way, much like we will see Don Quixote do in the reading. Each group will analyze their poem together and present it to the rest of the class." C. Active Learning--40 minutes As a class, read and discuss the excerpt from chapter 8 of Don Quixote in which he battles the windmills. (15 minutes) o First, give some background about what has been going on in the text so far. Read the paragraph from chapter 1 in which "finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, [Don Quixote's] brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." o Pausing to ask questions that check for understanding as necessary, read the excerpt from chapter 8. o Ask students to discuss Don Quixote's perception that the windmills are an enemy force. Does he seem insane? Why or why not?

UTL 640E, Haug Pflugerville High School/PISD Date of lesson: March 5, 2014

Molly Whiting AP English IV/12th grade Lesson Plan #2/Teach #3

o Suggest to students that sometimes even the sanest of people see an everyday object as something else entirely. Often, the people who perceive one object and describe it as something else are poets! In small groups, students analyze poems and present them to the rest of the class. (25 minutes) o Break students into groups of 3-4. Each group will get a different poem that uses metaphor to present a subject in a highly unconventional way. (Poems under consideration are Emily Dickinson's "I Like to See It Lap The Miles," May Swenson's "Southbound on the Freeway," Carl Sandburg's "Fog," Charles Simic's "Fork," William Jay Smith's "The Toaster," Charles Malam's "Steam Shovel," Beatrice Janosco's "The Garden Hose," and several of the riddle poems from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Poems will be given to students without their titles so that they can determine for themselves what subject the poem is actually describing.) o Students will be asked to analyze how each poem conveys its subject. What does the poet seem to be describing, and what is actually being described? ! As students work in their groups, teacher will move around the room, monitoring conversations and answering questions as necessary. (5 minutes) o Teacher will ask each group to appoint two speakers. One person will read their group's poem aloud to the rest of the class, and the other will present the group's analysis. (15 minutes: approximately 2 min/group) o After each group has presented, discuss the poems as a class. (5 minutes) ! What did they have in common? ! What kinds of subjects were being described? ! How can we relate the poems back to Don Quixote and the windmills? To Hamlet? D. Closure--2 minutes Pass notecards out to students and ask them to write down one thing they learned from the lesson today or one thing they are confused about/didn't like about the lesson. ! Feedback helps! Criticism is welcome. Collect the notecards. Thank students for their attention and participation! Modifications/Differentiation: Follow IEPS

UTL 640E, Haug Pflugerville High School/PISD Date of lesson: March 5, 2014

Molly Whiting AP English IV/12th grade Lesson Plan #2/Teach #3

Evaluation Strategies: Throughout the lesson, I will use questions to informally check for understanding. I will take notes and ask questions during the group presentations to evaluate how well groups worked together in analyzing their poems. I will review the notecards to better understand what students took away from the lesson/what they didn't understand.

Notes/Recommendations: The feedback I received from students on their exit-ticket assessment proved that this was a successful lesson. Several students acknowledged that poetry was a subject they usually despised and didnt understand, but that this lesson showed them how studying poetry could be fun. One student did suggest that the poems I selected for the small group activity werent very challenging; the current selection might be more appropriate for freshmen or sophomores, but for reteaching this lesson with upper-level students it could be beneficial to spend some time identifying more difficult texts to use. I do think this lesson was great for teaching in conjunction with Act II of Hamlet, but my observer pointed out that while I did a great job making this connection at the beginning of the lesson, I didnt revisit this connection in the closure. This is something I would need to work on if I wanted to reuse this lesson in the future.