Eloquence

Rationale

William C. Overfelt High School is located in San Jose, the third-largest city in California (and the 10 ^th largest in the U.S.). Despite its location in the heart of affluent Silicon Valley, the school serves approximately 1470 students who come from families that are working class; approximately 87% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, though we suspect that figure is closer to 92%, based on the qualified number of households of the main feeder middle school attended by siblings of our own students. It is a school whose public perception is determined by its low (but significantly improved) test scores and its location in a high poverty and high crime area, identified by the City of San José as a "gang hotspot." That is only one reality, however, for it is also true that Overfelt has had the most Latino students in Advanced Placement (AP) math classes of all East Side schools—combined. Despite the rise in test scores and the gains in academic achievements of our students, the school's reputation as one of lack has been slow to change. It is a reputation that the entire staff strives to change. We are a staff constantly searching for ways to make its students' education relevant and meaningful, an education that is the best it is in our power to provide. We are unafraid to explore and practice new methodologies we think might help us serve our students best.

In the second semester of the 2012-2013 school year, Overfelt began such a quest. With the growing interest in project-based learning, we started exploring the idea of joining the New Tech Network. ¹ A small group of teachers visited a local middle school and a high school in Napa that were part of the network, and many of them liked what they saw. In the summer of 2013, another small team attended New Tech's annual conference in New Orleans. Again, the response was very positive. As a result, the administrative and teacher leadership teams decided to explore the feasibility of becoming, in the 2014-2015 school year, the first comprehensive high school to join New Tech. The whole staff engaged in this very important dialogue. Despite the enthusiasm of the initial teams, some teachers felt it was misguided to put our energies into a major instructional shift to project-based learning, that the most pressing issue before us was to ensure that our teachers and support staff learned Common Core. They disagreed with the proponents of New Tech that project-based learning could be just the vehicle teachers needed to make that shift more smoothly. Rather, they argued, adding the pedagogical shift required for true project-based learning, not just projects as a part of a more traditional unit, would be too great when teachers were still trying to learn exactly what was required by Common Core. This emotional and sometimes contentious process culminated in a teacher vote just before the winter vacation. A 55% majority voted to join New Tech; however, this did not meet the required 2/3-majority threshold to pass. Proponents were disappointed. It was a hollow victory for the New Tech opponents, however. When we returned from the winter vacation, our district superintendent visited the school site to discuss the direction in which the district was moving in terms of instruction. He made clear that project-based learning would become the norm. He would leave it to schools to determine how that happened. The caveat was that if schools did not make that shift themselves, it would be made for them. What some saw as a threat, others saw as a challenge. Regardless of how anyone viewed it, though, the superintendent's words reopened the discussion about how to best make the shift to project-based learning, whether it was with New Tech or not.

It is with that preceding scenario and the challenge laid out by the superintendent in mind that I am creating this unit. I see this as an opportunity to use one of my favorite pieces of literature to begin making that (mandated) shift from the traditional teach-centered delivery of information to a more student-centered classroom which incorporates project-based learning as an integral part of the curriculum. Secondly, it meets two needs of my two students: 1) to read and understand classical literature and 2) to practice persuasive oral and written communication skills, abilities they will need and use throughout their lives. Finally, I hope also it helps to stem the tide of what I see happening in junior and senior English classrooms.

Driven by the findings of the California State University (CSU) English Placement Test Committee, which found incoming college freshmen lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to succeed in college, the traditional, classical literature-based classroom is being supplanted by the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC), ² an English classroom in which shorter, non-fiction pieces have become the main readings for our college-prep junior and senior English classes. It is this trend, among other things, that Carol Jago discussed in her book With Rigor For All. First published in 2000, a time when the California State Standards were in flux and "industry" was pushing to have workplace documents and other forms of non-fiction occupy a greater presence in the high school English classroom, Jago made an eloquent case for teaching classical literature in a multicultural, ability-diverse classroom. She argued:

The cost of such a shift would be catastrophic. Elite private and suburban schools are not likely to replace The Scarlet Letter with workplace documents. The sons and daughters of the privileged will continue to read The Odyssey and Beowulf while urban public school kids are handed instruction manuals and consumer reports. A democracy isn't supposed to work this way. … If informational texts come to replace the classics in our curriculum, high school students will graduate young people who have never seen Circe turn men into swine, who have never sailed past Scylla and Charybdis, and who have no knowledge of the danger luring in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. If they never read the classics, students will truly be at sea. ³

I agree whole-heartedly. However, the trend at Overfelt and at East Side Union High School District (East Side) has been to move in the other direction. The change at East Side perhaps is not to the extent to which Jago warned, but we should be worried when the only whole-class "novel" in the first semester of the senior year is not even a novel. ⁴ Thus, many English teachers are finding ways to meet the demands of the ERWC curriculum (which attempts to remedy the very real concerns of the CSU system) without giving up the literature we so love and know that many of our students will come to love, too. This unit strikes that balance. With Euripides' Medea as the foundational text, the unit will integrate classical literature into a unit that teaches students skills using some of the techniques used in project-based learning via a criminal trial. It will make real the connection between simply reading and appreciating persuasive writing and speaking and developing the ability to speak and write eloquently themselves. They will come to understand that these are the skills they need to be their own advocates.