I tried to group based mostly on what they’d be interested in (the novel study was later in the semester so I knew the students pretty well). I also tried to make sure that each student had a few people they were comfortable with in their circle– and this didn’t work to my advantage either. Even the students who were the most focussed and dedicated all semster would immediately talk with their friends about their social lives as soon as I moved to the next group to work with those students. While most students completed much of the work for the unit, I’d wager that the majority of it wasn’t in class.

I did find it funny how several students in the class asked, “Why can’t we all just read the same novel?!” I know they were used to being more “spoon fed” before in their previous classes as many teachers (including me for certain courses) read large sections (if not all) of their whole class novel studies to the class and then going through it that way. Many of our students thrive on strictly regulated structure (over half of our students have IEPs) and since they had to be a bit more independent in their work (responsible for most of their own reading, etc…) they found it quite difficult.

I’m going to be trying Literature Circles again with a particularly large (33) and chatty group of 3Us next month. I have 11 copies of each novel we’re looking at… so they can’t all choose the same novel. Perhaps I’ll try to devise some sort of quetionnaire to try and match student interests to the novels.

Last year, I was the only member of my department (to the best of my knowledge) who tried to use leveled texts… I was the guinea pig, if you will. While I explained how each of the novels had its challenges to my 3C class, I was suprised at student reactions when I distributed the texts. Students who received a novel that was shorter (not “easier” by any means) than the others automatically assumed they were in the “dumb” group and kept on referring to themselves as such (which created an entirely unexpected set of classroom management issues to deal with). Furthermore, even though the class was quite well behaved during the entire semester, when they worked in their literature circles, that all went out the window. Even within the groupings, reading levels (and work ethics?) were so different that some would be ahead and others would be so very far behind. It was a bit of a nightmare…I think that perhaps differentiated assessment might be a better way to go (even using the same text). This is often what happens when split courses (1P/2P or 3C/4C) run.

I do agree that we may be doing a major disservice to our College/ Applied students by teaching novels. I went to a session at Fanshawe once (you may have been with me, Danika) where the facilitator expressed her frustration with OSSD grads, saying that they could read poems and understand theme and characterization in novels, but they had very low ability with respect to technical writing. She went on to say that their policy was to take 5% off a student’s mark (up to 30%) for grammatical errors. Therefore, a student who achieves 70% on a report but makes 6 major errors fails said assignment.

Is is perhaps time to abandon creative writing (and the study of it) in College/ Applied/ Workplace/ Essential courses? Eeeek!!!

In terms of resources, I think the ideal solution would be for there to be money to invest in new novels, at the same time though, while I think this is a worthwhile endeavor for the academic classes, I’m not so sure that it would be meeting the needs of our workplace and applied students. Are novel studies the best way to achieve the curriculum expectations with all our students?

P.S. Thanks for writing!