More Pre-Pre-Planning

Scenes from St. Augustine -- This building fronts San Marco and faces the bay. It houses several shops and the A1A Aleworks. I've heard the food there is really good, although that's another restaurant in the area we haven't tried.

I pulled a sample framework from the GPS website for American Lit, but I think I'm going to teach it the way I normally do. The framework I found is chronological with the genres mixed (the traditional way to teach a survey course). It feels spotty to me, though, to hit a novel here, a short story there, etc.

A friend of mine from another high school introduced me to the concept of frontloading a survey course a few years ago. I tried it, liked it, then turned the fiction semester around so we start at the contemporary period and work backward. Last year was the first time I'd done that and it seemed to work well.

So here's my yearlong plan for 11th American Lit:

First semester: Fiction

1) Contemporary (or Post-Modern) period (short stories by Anne Tyler and John Updike)
2) Modernism: The Great Gatsby
3) Realism: The Awakening
4) Naturalism: Crane
5) Romanticism: The Scarlet Letter

Second Semester: Drama, Non-fiction, poetry

1) The Crucible
2) Colonial & Revolutionary period letters, journals, etc.
3) Transcendentalism: Thoreau & Emerson
4) Poetry: all 400 years of it

The second semseter also contains a 12-week personal research project.

I have to start making calendars for August & September soon. And set up my classroom. And . . .