The New Curriculum
Well, I had meant to update a little more often, but I haven't done it. Here's why. I've been busy updating the curriculum.
See, I realized at the end of last term that, although things were not going badly in the NELP program, they weren't going as well as they could be.
Originally, we had a literature textbook. Unfortunately, half the students said it was too easy, and half said it was too hard and about 75% of them said they just didn't like it.
So after that, I started using newspaper articles. The newspaper articles were good because they were challenging, and they were fresh. I could choose articles that matched the students' interesting, and that was a good thing.
However, as I said, I began to realize that something was missing. Newspaper articles, I told my students, have a lot of vocabulary: but they only have ONE KIND of vocabulary. They only have ONE KIND of grammar. In real life, there are many kinds of vocabulary and many varieties of grammar, and this was something that I knew we had to address a little better.
So I decided to expand the curriculum, give it more variety. I have, in essence, reestablished my reading classes as LITERATURE classes. I could not find a satisfactory textbook, and considering the nature of NELP, that is perhaps a good thing. Instead, I am MAKING a textbook for my students in the form of an online reading curriculum.
Each half-term, the students will have one poem, one short story, one non-fiction article, and one current issue from a newspaper or magazine. I can already see that this is going to reinvigorate the students.
We have everything from Shel Silverstein to Isaac Asimov. We have the humor of James Thurber, the adventure of Rudyard Kipling, the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as more recent works of fiction by authors such as Kelly Link and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
Our non-fiction likewise is diverse, including recipes, fashion, psychology, history, architecture, technology, great speeches (including three wonderful Native American speeches), stories of modern-day pirates, and lost gold mines, massive volcanoes to haunted hotels.
The volume and variety is really exciting for me. However, we've already had a few bumps in the road. I was perhaps far, overly ambitious in attempting to teach Tennyson. It wasn't merely the vocabulary, but the structure of the poem itself. I've therefore already replaced some older poems with more contemporary works, including modern music lyrics and a very nice Robert Frost poem. I hope these will be received a little better.
Any curriculum is a work in progress, but I hope this work will be, with a few exceptions, enduring.
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Date: 2008⁄09⁄10 15:23｜Permalink｜Author：nelp