Abbreviated Lesson Plan on "Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits"

 

Abbreviated Lesson Plan on “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits”

Link to poem: jorge_the_church_janitor_finally_quits.pdf (martinespada.net)

Objectives:

1. Students will be able to connect the themes of identity and respect to an experience in their own life by writing a personal narrative that is five paragraphs long about a time their identity, social status, or privilege affected a social interaction. 

CCSS:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

-Students will meet this standard by writing a personal narrative about a specific event in which they viewed someone based only on their ethnicity, occupation, or social status.  

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3.D
Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.

-Students will be evaluated on this standard through the content of their personal narrative. While reading the teacher will be looking for the storytelling techniques contained in this standard. 

Activities:

1.     Begin by introducing the concept of up-down both-why questions (UBDW). Students will be told that UBDW questions are to help them form an personal and emotional connection to the text. UBDW questions are answered by circling/drawing a thumbs up or down over a line segment. Then, underneath the line segment, students have to answer why they chose a thumbs up or down. To most efficiently complete this task as a class, students will be given a sheet that contains a few questions to help focus on certain aspect of the poem like identity and social status. This is to guide the students into writing a personal narrative about specific instance in which they viewed, or where viewed, based only on their ethnicity, social status, or occupation. These questions will be on a worksheet  to be filled out by the students. The worksheet will look something like this:

Question 1. How do you feel when the speaker of the poem states: "No one asks / where I am from, / I must be/ from the country of janitors, /I have always mopped this floor."

DOWN                                                                BOTH                                                                    UP

Why?

Question 2. Look at this line in the poem: "What they say/  must be true:/  I am smart, / but I have a bad attitude." Do you think the speaker has a bad attitude? 

DOWN                                                                BOTH                                                                    UP

Why?

2.       Read the poem “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” as a class. 

3.       Allow students 10-15 minutes to fill out their worksheet before sharing out with the class. 

4.       Five-minute brain break before sharing out. Ask students a community-builder question.

5.       Students will now share out their reactions from the UDBW worksheet. The teacher will ask "what was your reaction to question X?" Then, students will collectively hold a thumbs up/down or both. The teacher will then ask if anyone wants to share their "Why?". This process will continue until all worksheet questions have been answered.

6.     The teacher will now ask this question to the class: "Have you ever judged someone based on the job they do?" Starting out small, this question is meant to think about one aspect covered in the poem: respect. This is to get students thinking about how they evaluate others based on their job. The teacher will then go on to introduce the concept of identity, and how someone's job is just one aspect of someone's identity. The teacher will then go onto connect how Jorge's race and social class contributed to how others saw him. After all of this is discussed, the teacher will introduce students to the writing prompt for the personal narrative that they will write. 

7. Students will begin to plan their personal narratives. 

Assessments:

The personal narrative is the end goal and will not be completed by the end of this lesson, so it will be unable to be evaluated. Instead, students will be evaluated on the following:

Students will receive a grade when they complete the worksheet filled with up-down both-why questions relating to the poem being read (quality of responses X/10).

Students will receive a participation grade when they participate in class by sharing out their UDBW responses (X/1).

Rationale for lesson:

In this lesson, students will be learning to apply aspects of their identity, such as race and social class, to the construction of a personal writing narrative. Students may not have thought about questioning these aspects of identity before. In order to ease students into writing about this difficult and personal topic, they will be given an example text (Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits) and a UBDW question sheet. The purpose of the UBDW question sheet is to guide students to aspects of the poem that deal with identity and connect it with their personal thoughts and feelings. Additionally, the main idea of the poem connects with the personal narrative prompt that students will write, as both the students' writings and Espada's poem deal with how race, social class, and work, all affect the way someone is viewed by others in society.