Layering Instruction: Text Selection

ENGLISH 1A: Non-Fiction Reading and Writing
Fall 2020 Readings/Viewings:

All of the texts feature models of effective writing and present learning as a key theme. As the students are reading about rowing solo across an ocean or about octopuses and shellfish navigation, they are also reading about learning. Resilience (through preparation and practice) is another underlying theme. Four layers of instruction through text selection.

And I haven't started talking yet.

Martin Wells, Civilization and the Limpet

Tori Murden McClure, A Pearl in the Storm

Tim Severin, The Brendan Voyage

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Films: Heart of the Sea and Fish People

and a collection of short essays on related topics.

Homework: Water Adventure Non-Fiction

Or, Happily Annotating.

This upcoming semester, I will be teaching a fairly recent water adventure book: Tori Murden McClure's A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. As the front cover sets forth, McClure becomes "the first woman to row alone across an ocean."

I've taught a fair amount of water and underwater nonfiction (and fiction), but I am particularly looking forward to reading and teaching this book with my classes. For one, McClure fails her first attempt to row across the Atlantic. The majority of the volume concerns this first voyage, this first attempt, and that seems fitting too. We shall see; I've read enough to know this book will work well, but I am in the midst of a true reading, a committed reading, with the classroom in my mind.

I don't just mean concocting vocabulary lists, quiz questions, and essay topics, but also conceiving exercises in practical imagination. For example, in a few minutes, I'm going out to the garage to pull out a handy blue tarp to be folded into the dimensions of McClure's rowboat, a robust 23' x 6', more or less. And if you imagine being confined to a space like that for, say, three months, there's more less than more involved.

Okay, where's that tarp?

Or a cardboard mock-up?

The possibilities . . . .

One reason why I teach, frankly: feeling out the possibilities, invoking the practical imagination.

McClure, Tori Murden. A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.