It's been a good teaching week. On Monday, on my way home from work, I bought a bushel of apples from my favorite orchard, Coston Farms. On Tuesday, I was surprised to find out how much a bushel of apples weighs as I carried them to my office--happily, there was a cart inside the door of my office/classroom building.
I took apples to every class. I had them lift the box, so that they had an idea about how much a bushel weighs. It's something we've lost, as we've moved from being an agricultural society to our current culture that's largely out of touch with where we get our food.
In my writing classes, we described an apple before I gave them an apple. Then they described the apple that was in front of them, and we compared the two pieces of writing. We talked about depictions of apples in popular culture (Snow White, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, and Johnny Appleseed). We looked at the poignant poem "Summer Apples," by Catheryn Essinger, and talked about the apple as a "little cathedral to memory." Then we did some additional writing. I realized that I would have lots and lots of apples, so I took some to my British Literature class too.
It's very similar to what I did two years ago, and I wrote about in this blog post. I'm happy to report that it worked again. Two years ago, I came up with the plan because I wanted to have a reason to buy a bushel of apples. Last year, all my plans were upended by Hurricane Helene.
My plan for this week and next is to do various autumnal themed activities and then have a writing assignment about which one best captured the season. Today we'll watch the "Thriller" video; it will be interesting to see how many of them are familiar with the whole video or with the song or with Michael Jackson at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment