The Old Man and Planet Earth

If I haven't blogged about school, it only means I've been focusing that much more on school! There's always so much to do and I always find myself planning what might come next.

This past week we started a new unit on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I'm still trying to adjust my lesson plans for the fact that there's only one classroom set of books. This means I can't possibly assign 50 pages to be read as homework and then spend class time discussing and analyzing a novel. No, most of each 90 minute block period is spent actually reading the book out loud. In a way I quite enjoy it, because that way I can stop every few paragraphs and explain what's going on for ELLs and other students who might not catch every word. It just takes a whole lot longer to get through even a short novel like Old Man.


Of course, I like to explore every angle I can when talking about literature, so it's mostly my fault that it takes so long to get through. For example, to talk about the setting of the book I not only showed them some PowerPoint slides on Cuba and talked about Fidel Castro and the US economic embargo, but I also left the last twenty minutes of class free so we could watch part of that most excellent BBC miniseries Planet Earth.

If you really knew me you would know I love watching that beautiful compilation of nature and animal footage. The excuse was that my students would get a better feel for what kind of fish the old man Santiago would be dealing with - all the life under the sea that he probably didn't realize existed. And some that he definitely knew about:

It's one of my favorite parts, when they capture the great white shark leaping out of the water and snarfing down a seal in ultra-slow-motion. I swear this big guy KNEW he was being filmed and deliberately posed for the camera over 10 feet out of the water with a freshly dead seal in his mouth. Delicious. (The shot, not the seal.)

There are still more scenes from other episodes I'd like my kids to watch, especially one part where it shows the giant sailfish that look just like the old man's marlin, and schools of tuna and dolphins that shared the Cuban ocean with him.

In the meantime, though, we've got to get into the text itself. I might have days where they will read silently, but it's looking like I will be reading most of the book out loud. It's really not that bad - after three weeks I think my voice is finally getting used to saying the same thing six times in two days. Really, my 1A class is nowhere near as good as my 3B, because by then I've done it enough times to be quite prepared.

Right now I'm looking for a way to have them make some kind of posters or decorations to put on the walls of the classroom. It's still looking quite bare - dark and gloomy from the oppressive green of the chalkboards, lacking the clean white look of dry-erase boards in the other rooms. I've requested white boards two separate times but nothing's been done. And now with all this talk of getting a new school built, I doubt they'll spend the time or money to fix up rooms that are going to be demolished eventually anyway.

Ah, well. For now, I'll do the best with what I've got. And try to blog a little more about it! :)