Welcome to the cKotch.Com blog. I’m Christopher Kotcher, and this is an inspiring lesson from my student teaching.
College’s Final Challenge
Student teaching was a rough experience.
The workload of creating daily lesson plans and materials was expected but still immense. Grading took forever, especially with essays. Many students were unprepared for a high school English class featuring writing and grammar.
Thankfully, I did have a few things going for me.
My cooperating teacher saw the need to challenge students. My university supervisor was a favorite professor of mine. Other staff members at my hosting school provided useful guidance. Fellow student teachers shared their similar stories for moral support.
But the greatest inspiration came from those incredible moments the stars aligned and everything went right in the classroom.
These times showed me I was doing something good in going into teaching. They showed me I could set goals and students could meet them.
Best example would be my lesson on Chapter 3 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby.
First, Some Background
Many have encountered The Great Gatsby in at least one English class. Still, a brief summary can be helpful for those who have not, those who have forgotten, and those who never paid attention.
Fitzgerald was a celebrity author from that wild time known as the Roaring Twenties. He became famous for his books, his wife, his alcoholism, and blowing all his money on wild parties. As money faded, Fitzgerald even kept the party going by borrowing money from his publisher. From his boss.
This guy’s love of parties and upper class living pervades all of his writing, and The Great Gatsby is no exception. It has a party of some sort in every chapter.
So, why this book? What makes this the one everyone knows and, hopefully, reads?
Well, Gatsby was written and published as the party was winding down. This book was not written by the young Fitzgerald aspiring for a wild life of luxury. No, Gatsby came from a more aware Fitzgerald. Someone who had seen firsthand what it is like to be party animal. Someone who discovered only an empty void at the bottom of an empty bottle.
Gatsby reveals the isolation and loneliness which came from everything Fitzgerald had ever wanted.
This was a wild and crazy time, but everyone was isolated.
Planning, Planning, Planning
For my lessons, I needed to determine how each chapter supported the themes of The Great Gatsby.
Chapter 3 featured the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway going to a big event. His first appearance at one of title character Jay Gatsby’s famous house parties.
The book constantly described the party as a spectacle. Musicians blared instruments. Guests danced with wild abandon. Lights shined all around. Drinks filled the house in joyful spite of the era’s prohibition laws.
The party had grabbed everyone. Everyone, except its host. Jay Gatsby stood in the corner all alone. Still, you could tell there was something special about him. His smile and eyes grabbed you. When those eyes stared at you, they showed you everything right with the world. They showed you that you were an incredible person.
(The purpose of the parties and the reason for Gatsby’s isolation are revealed later in the novel. But, since they are not discussed in Chapter 3 or in my lesson on it, I will leave these things to you to discover or review.)
I linked my Chapter 3 lesson to the literary tool of imagery, the use of sensory details in a story. Imagery is meant to place readers inside of a scene. To make them a part of the book’s world and understand what it is like to live there.
Sights and sounds filled the chapter. They made Gatsby’s party a real event. It was just the kind of wild and crazy time Fitzgerald would have thrown all his boss’s money into.
Still, the host was removed from the fun. He barely talked to anyone all night aside from Nick. Likewise, no guests seemed to be talking about anything worthwhile with each other. Closest thing would be a loopy man with owl-eyed glasses praising the realness of the books in Gatsby’s bookshelf.
No real bonds seemed to form between anyone.
Should that not be the point of social interactions and events? Forming and strengthening friendships and relationships to last through the years?
Fitzgerald had all this imagery to show the greatest party ever. And yet, nothing showed any trace of genuine communication. That divide was how Chapter 3 supported the novel’s themes. This was a wild and crazy time, but everyone was isolated.
Better Than Ever Expected
The lesson was ready to go.
After daily silent reading, I announced the class would be having a different sort of lecture today. I went to the whiteboard and drew the outline of a house.
We would be creating an image of Gatsby’s house party together. An image to help us both see the spectacle and speculate on its purpose for the book.
Standard practice in an imagery lesson would have involved showing artist renditions of a scene, photos of similar parties from the time, or related movie clips. But I wanted to involve my students in a creative process. Something to engage them and use our own class vision of Gatsby’s party.
I even allowed a couple students per class to draw the party on the whiteboard themselves. First hour was too tired to give me any takers, and second hour only wanted to draw a few things here and there. But fourth and sixth hour really threw themselves into things. That is why this post honors their party drawings specifically.
Every bit of imagery in the drawing had to be supported with a quote from The Great Gatsby. Discussion happened all throughout our artistic process.
Students wanted to know what the party could possibly mean. The lesson had grabbed them. They wanted to learn. And for many of them, that was a major step forward.
Each class ended with a discussion of the party’s meaning. Every hour figured that the party showed something to do with emptiness and isolation in Fitzgerald’s own time.
The first thread noticed was always Gatsby’s own distance from everyone else. The host was withdrawn in his own house.
Then I pushed the students further. Helped them see that no one really connected to anyone during all the grand sights and sounds of Gatsby’s party.
Fourth hour though, they had the best final discussion.
They connected the party’s lonely excitement to social media. Places where they interacted with the crowd yet made few genuine connections. Places that have their uses (like building a writer’s online brand) but are often used for too much more.
Now, it is one thing for a teacher to suggest a book’s “real-world connection.” It is another thing for students to see that connection and discuss examples. But when students create those connections completely on their own? That is something amazing.
That means students have absorbed the novel’s themes. They have found wisdom in it and used it to evaluate their own lives. In this case, perhaps students may become more aware of some drawbacks with their tweeting and snapping. Maybe they will start working toward some healthy limits.
My students started doing with literature the thing I most wanted them to do. This was my purpose as both a teacher and writer. To open people to wisdom and inspire them to be their best selves.
Fourth hour even found the perfect phrase to sum up my lesson’s key idea: “This is a wild and crazy time, but everyone is isolated.”
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