Objectives
While I will be observing the Illinois State Board of Education English Standards, the College Readiness Standards, and new Common Core standards, one of the main objectives that I want my students to achieve is critical thinking. My students have asked me why they should bother to do this with poetry. The answer is that poetry itself and the reading of poetry too take great skill in performing and articulating the mental acrobatics of an argument. That is the true essence of critical thinking and can be captured in the College Board's objectives as well: 3
- Wide-ranging vocabulary used with denotative accuracy and connotative resourcefulness
- A variety of sentence structures, including appropriate use of subordinate and coordinate constructions
- A logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques of coherence such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis
- A balance of generalization with specific illustrative detail
- An effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, maintaining a consistent voice, and achieving emphasis through parallelism and antithesis
- At NMSH we follow the College Readiness Standards (CRS), designed by the American College Testing Program, to help guide our instruction. More specifically the unit is designed to help students develop or enhance the following skills: 4
Main Idea and Author's Approach:
- Distinguish between key concepts and secondary ideas in a text and be able to write a concise summary.
- Determine how an inference might change based on additional information
- Search for clues that suggest the viewpoint from which a text is written and whether that point of view is biases or valid (and discuss what this means)
- Look at rhetorical devices an author or narrator uses to convey their message (i.e. imagery, metaphor, analogy) and discuss effectiveness of these devices
- Supporting Details:
- Gather and interpret details in a text that support key points (find evidence in text to back up ideas)
- Check inferences against information provided in a text to identify what is and is not supported by the text.
- Identify details that support key points.
- Generalizations and Conclusions
- Pull together information in challenging texts to make generalizations/conclusions about people or situations.
- Use other sources to provide examples or counterexamples to confirm or disprove generalizations
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