Never forget to question!

It is important to shape critical questions around core standards for your subject. I liked how Hobbs did this with her the critical questions in the chapter. It is important to remember the core standards, and that our lesson plans should be centered on them. If it is hard for you to think of critical questions look to the objective of your lesson plan and the core standards to prompt you. Classroom conversations are about promoting self-learning—not about the teacher rattling off all they know about a certain subject. Hobbs addresses the fact that we should not use closed questions. I think that is a very important point to remember when thinking of critical questions to ask your students. I always hated it when teachers would be driving for a certain answer to the question they were asking that I knew I wouldn’t get right. After a few feeble attempts the class would go silent expectantly waiting for the teacher to give everyone the “right” answer. The answers to these questions were about learning what the teacher wanted you to learn so that you could past the test—there was no learning for learnings sake.

When reading through Hobb’s five critical questions I kind of felt that they were those questions that sought a specific answer. When a teacher asks what the purpose of a text is it makes it appear as if there must be a specific answer that the teacher is seeking. There are only so many meanings one can derive from a text—at least in the minds of youth. At least that is what I felt growing up, even though I have learned otherwise in my college years. The thing that caused me to open my eyes to the possibility of a multiplicity of answers to the question “what is the purpose of the text” was the encouragement I received to seek my own understanding. Instead of asking what the purpose was my professors would ask what I understood the purpose to be or what the messages were that I saw. By incorporating the students into the questions you open students up for critical analysis, for student centered learning. This idea of student centered learning is what I desire to promote in my classroom.

To achieve this goal I will seek to only ask questions that open ended and that will cause my students to really think about what we are learning. For example, if we are working on characters for a production I can ask my students questions like: “why would Millie move to the big city? What would cause you to make that change? How would you be feeling in a new place? What does freedom mean to you?” These questions can help students to connect with the characters they are portraying onstage, and can help them to understand that characters all have reasons behind what they do just like people do. The question about freedom could be an essential overarching questing that I am trying to teach my students through this play. Thoroughly Modern Millie is a play about being able to do anything, the freedom to be whomever you want to be—students might get other meanings from the play and that is great. I can still use this theme of freedom to help my students to think about what freedom is and what it means to them.

Speaking of freedom, let us turn our attention now to what has come to be known as the American Dream. Scott Sanders essay entitled “Homeplace” revolves around this idea of the “American Dream”. The American Dream is to have the perfect car, house, spouse, and kids. People move from place to place looking for this dream life that simply isn’t attainable because they have lost sight in what America really means. This blindness is caused by the influence of the media that shows more and more eye appealing gadgets and gizmos that everybody “has to have”. People continue to think that life will get better if they can just buy that new car, but for some reason life doesn’t improve people simply fixate on another thing that they must have. This is just my own opinion but I do want to see my students input on this idea of the influence of media on the America Dream. I could rely especially the questions Hobbs presents under the “representation and reality” section of “Analysis in Action”. Students can analyze media over the ages to see how the American Dream has changed. Students would be put into groups and given an era to research media on and then each group could present their findings to others in the class. I really would like my students to be able to think about media in a critical way, for students not to be citizens who follow but rather citizens that lead. Student’s need to be informed of the power of the media so that they don’t become controlled by it—so that they can use it to their advantage. By analyzing and evaluating the power of the media students can break free of the mold and become like those stubborn Millers in Sanders essay—people who love what little they have.