(5) Social Networking as a Way of Understanding Perspective in an English Classroom

Last semester, in my CURR 312-03 (Teaching English Language Learners) class, the lesson plan in my content area given to me to modify was based on understanding perspective. The main text for this lesson was The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, which retold the popular three pig fairy tale in the big bad wolf's point of view. I found it very intriguing because it defied the conventional idea of a protagonist and forced students to look through the eyes of a character they might otherwise be unsympathetic to.

I recently started tutoring a student for my READ 411 class's fieldwork. N is eleven and very good at math. Just Wednesday, she was telling me about how she was chosen to take a special math placement test. English, however, is very difficult for her to grasp sometimes. Like me, she is American born, but the child of Bengali immigrants who can't always help her in English the way they can in math, which has a more universal language.

I asked N this weekend if she was familiar with facebook, to which she replied, "Well, duh, don't you have one?" This is a response I feel may be common to children and young adults nowadays, but I think it's possible to use it to our advantage, particularly in an English classroom. With that in mind, and tasked to create a multimedia lesson plan for READ 411, N and I read the introduction of D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. This is a text I recommend to any teacher introducing Greek mythology, which can be very dark, to very young students. The intro outlined the disparities between titans and gods and how the balance of power between them continually shifted.

After we'd read the intro, I asked N to recap it for me as briefly as she could. Once that was complete, I inquired whether she had a favorite character; she chose, quite obviously, Zeus, who is outlined as the hero who brought the tyrannical titans to their knees. D'Aulaires is especially wonderful because it helped N understand the complex family dynamic of the Olympians, the upper echelon of the gods. I urged her to take this understanding and, to assess it, create a facebook for Zeus that incorporated statuses and relationships to properly portray his perspective and his interaction with the other gods. This was a really fun task for her. She seemed to instantly know based on Zeus' dialogue in the myths that he might not speak to his peers the way she does hers. I noted down specific things she wrote as statuses (hiding from Hera again, getting advice from Athena, keeping Aphrodite away from flirty gods, etc), as well as the image she took from Google to use as Zeus' profile picture.

I think having students do something like this in a greater quantity, in my future classroom, would not only cater to their interests, but also help them get into the head-space of a character they might not otherwise care for. N told me she liked doing what we did, that it was fun, and there are vast differences between an ageless male god and an eleven year old girl, but she closed this gap almost effortlessly during the assignment.