"Agony"

When I wrote the word AGONY on the white board this morning, my students thought I had lost it.  After all, it IS outside my personality to focus on the negative.  Regardless of their strange looks, they wrote their 10 line to discuss aspects of the meaning of the word  Here are a few of their comments:

• "Agony is being tied to a medevil torture device..." 
• "When I am forced to go to tutoring when I'd rather be in shop..."
• "After sleeping in until noon because I stayed up all night playing Mortal Combat, sitting in a desk during first period on a Monday after winter break -- that's agony."

These are all great examples of the theme -- especially that third comment!  However, none of them fit the theme I planned for the day.

"Let's think about your thinking; use Metacognition.  How did you know how to define the word, AGONY?  Turn and talk."  

I figured that most students could easily define AGONY, so as they were talking, I quickly took the "french fry" synonym strips from our interactive "Supersize Your Vocabulary" board and distributed them to each group.  They distributed the synonym strips to each member and were instructed to discuss unknown words that matched the over-simplistic words on the board.  As they did this, I eavesdropped on their conversations (some may call this "student observation" or "informal formative assessment").  Students then headed toward the board and to place their more challenging words inside the french fry boxes.

"Let's think about your thinking again, consider one of the words that challenged you."  After discussing a few examples, I instructed them to "write down that challenging word on your 10 line paper.  Using these skeleton key phrases and words 'I know that ___ means _______because...', compose a sentence or two that discusses your strategy to show HOW you arrived at your definition."

Some students decided upon their definitions based know familiar forms of the word.  Here were their comments:

• "I have horses, so I knew that MINIATURE fit in the SMALL box because there were miniature horses at the last show I went to."
• "In Masonry, we have been talking about foundations; my teacher always uses the word SATURATED to describe what the ground is like after it rains, so I placed my word in the WET box."
• "DESERTED makes me think of a desert; I know that there is not much in the desert, so I placed it in the EMPTY box; it just seemed like the right place to go."

Of course, these examples were just one strategy students used to define words, but for the purpose of our lesson, I focused on definitions that included prior knowledge and prior understanding.  We talked about the fact that these students used "schema" in order to define the word.

"When you read, you need to combine the clues from the text with your prior knowledge, your "schema", to truly connect to the reading.  Text doesn't always come out and tell you what to think; it sometimes challenges you to make connections to your experiences, and it's these connections that take you to a different level of understanding."  

Here's where I bring it home.  I projected the following video on the board and told the kids, "I'm going to show you a clip from an award-winning broadway play, Into the Woods.  Some of you may be familiar with this musical, and if that's the case, I'm going to ask you hang tight to your answers so that others might activate their schema to uncover the meaning.  For those of you who have never seen this clip, I want you to use what you know from costumes, the setting, and the lyrics.  Make predictions -- there are no wrong answers; you are only wrong if you don't wake up your schema to make sense of what is projected.  Ready?"  

• At 35 seconds, I paused the video and asked questions like these: "What do you see on the screen?  Who is the character?  How do you know he is who he is?  What is he singing about?  Overall, what type of musical is this -- what's the feeling?  How do you know this?" My students typically responded that the character is a major or a general -- someone important in the military and they knew this because of his uniform.  They all felt that he was singing about a lost love, and they thought that the overall mood of the play would be serious...and boring.  (LOL!)  I reminded them that they should continue using their schema to make sense of the song; they may be right but they may be wrong ..."and that's okay -- as long as you're thinking -- as long as you're trying to make connections."  I also assured them that the song is only 2 1/2 minutes long, so "I promise it won't bore you to death," and I pressed play.
• At 1:57, I paused once again and asked, "Have your initial thoughts changed?"  Most nodded in agreement.  "It's okay to change your inference based on a change in clues from the song.  Remember -- activate your schema and see if you can figure out who these two are!" ...and even students who would never be caught dead watching a musical were paying attention.

Once the clip had finished, I asked them "Who are the characters?  How did you know?  What specific lyrics gave it away?"  Most were able to identify the blonde haired prince right away:

• STUDENT ONE:  "When he said, 'Climing her hair,' it reminded me of Tangled."  Of course we had to debate that Flynn from the movie was not a prince; we all finally agreed that he WAS sort of a hero so that makes him prince-like.  (Sometimes listening to these kids really cracks me up.)
• STUDENT TWO:  "'Always 10 feet below' shows that he's standing at the tower where the princess was held prisoner.  But why is the other guy '10 feet behind'?"  I love giving these kids the chance to think; sometimes, learning is messy, but sometimes, these fishbowl discussions must be permitted so that we can all watch how others think.  
• STUDENT THREE:  "If the other prince is '10 feet behind', it means he's chasing something..."
• STUDENT TWO:  (with eyes gleaming as if there's a secret, but she's not willing to reveal the answer)  "...or chasing someONE!"
• STUDENT ONE:  (not willing to reveal the answer either) "...someone who is missing a shoe..."

Of course with this last clue, the kids know that the second prince is from Cinderella.  Now it was time to make the connection to the lesson:  "Let's talk about what you needed to discover the answers."  We found that the schema would be broken into three categories:

1. There were students who had seen the movie, watched the musical, or have even been a part of the musical.  Their schema was complete; they knew the song and could tell everyone else how great the entire musical is.
2. Then, there were a few students who had experienced neither the fairytales nor the movie.
3. There were students who knew the one or both of the princes from childhood fairytales, television programs like Once Upon a Time or movies like Disney's Cinderella.

Students in the first category were at the greatest advantage because they were completely familiar with the story, the characters, and the mood; their experience was more like "re-reading" the text.  Students in the second category were at the greatest DIS-advantage because they could only rely on the clues from the clip; they may not have been able to pick up all of the lyrics, and because the clues were not in print form, they could only experience the information once.  Students in the third category more able to infer the answers than those who had no prior knowledge; the third group were able to use the clues from the screen and their own schema 

Though there ARE bibliophiles who enjoy rereading their favorite stories, but many of our students are reading text for the first time.  In order to make connections and achieve complete understanding of the text, they need to utilize clues from the text and make attempts to activate their own prior knowledge.  When this happens, the "AGONY" of the frustrated reader might be avoided.