Text Sets

Building Bridges by S. Herz
What Else? Other Approaches by S. Herz
SAY:
     I've found through these Say/Dos that there are a lot of things about teaching that just seem daunting to me.  Text sets have turned out to be one of those things.  I feel like I am at a point in my educational career where I have read a ton of stuff, but most of it comes from the canon because I majored in English.  We do not really focus on stuff that is for readers of a lower reading level, and especially readers who are learning English as a second language.  In fact, I have no idea how to choose books for kids who are learning English as a second language.  I am glad that we are creating these text sets so that I can have this collection of resources for my future classroom.

In Building Bridges Herz talks about something that we are all familiar with, the thematic unit.  This article seems like something that we have been working up to all semester because it is largely things we already know from this class.  I too thought that getting kids to read more than one book at a time was ridiculous when we were talking about it at the beginning of this course, but now, I'm not so sure.  These text sets offer us a way to enter students into book clubs based around topics that we are discussing with our main texts.  These readings are connected to everything that we have read about because they form the basis of our units.  When we are teaching with Socratic discussions, we can pull an article from our text sets to foster discussion about a certain topic.   These information and explanatory texts can also act as mentor texts when we are teaching students how to write in multiple genres.  Teaching multigenre papers is the most obvious way to use text sets because we can teach them in the context of our core text by giving students different examples of genre because we now have a set amount of different genres to show them.

Students can begin transacting with text through the text sets as well.  Students do not want to read The Grapes of Wrath and I don’t blame them.  Herz brings up a good point when he talks about word spreading about texts in English class.  Students don’t want to give these canonical texts a chance because they have heard from other students about how awful they are.  We can experiment with this by doing what Milner and Milner call ‘Title Testing.’  We can see what they already think they know about a work, and then gauge our lessons based around that. We can get them to interact with these canonical texts by first giving them something that they will enjoy reading and getting them to respond to that.  Once they have established this connection we can begin discussion comparing these works to the piece of canon that they are reading.  

DO:
The DO for this week is of course my text set.  The canonical text that I chose to work with is one of my favorites that I have not really thought about teaching before, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  The theme I chose to work with is "Surviving in a Prejudiced Society." My texts focus around the experiences of groups of people who have been othered in American society over the past hundred years.  This text set focuses on race and ethnicity and how are views have changed since the writing of Huck Finn and more importantly, how they have stayed the same.

Huck Finn Text Set