I thought I had a well behaved class…until I got a student teacher. That’s when the Lord of the Flies broke out. Kids who had been angels in the classroom for over half the school year turned into savages. One day the student teacher left for the day and I resumed my role as teacher. And they suddenly turned to angels again.
That led me to think about civilization and the meaning of being civilized. Without rules do even the most civilized turn into savages? William Golding thought so.
Quote: “I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”
Analysis: This nationalistic comment reveals that Jack views the English as a superior race and depicts his attempt to control the boys. The mention of the English in this way aims to make the descent into savagery a lot more impactful.
We can look at this quote in conjunction with how Jack’s arrival is originally depicted a chapter before:
Quote: Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was fumbling along…Then the creature stepped from the mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing (19).
Analysis: The arrival of Jack Merridew and his militant choir is described as the arrival of a beast or creature, foreshadowing Jack’s transformation from despotic choir leader to pig hunter to murderous dictator later in the novel.
Life Lesson
So what’s your classroom look like? I’m guessing it’s not quite as bad as Lord of the Flies, but if you’re finding it chaotic, maybe you need to look at routines.
How is your education? Are you still learning? Just because we no longer attend school doesn’t mean we should stop learning. The internet has made getting an education more accessible than ever. I have taken classes on digital media, digital marketing, and pickleball during the past year. Some of these I’ve paid for and some I haven’t.
I’ve even created a course specifically designed for ELA Teachers on how to create a semester’s worth of lesson plans in just a few days. So imagine having all your lesson plans done for the entire first semester or even the entire year on the first day of school.
I’m going to put a link in my show notes for anyone interested in checking out my video course, let you get a feel for my philosophy on teaching, lesson plans, etc. We’ll send you some free videos as well.
I mentioned earlier about my classroom descending into chaos at the instruction to grab textbooks off the shelf. What I needed was a routine for collecting textbooks. Since I gave no expectations on how to retrieve books from the bookshelves, students just did whatever the heck they do.
Now I have a routine and an expectation–it’s row by row, by the way or one kid from each row gets books for the row.
I also noticed that the better my lesson plans and the clearer my expectations, the better my class went. That’s why I created ELACommonCoreLessonPlans.com. Among the unites I have you can find a complete unit for Lord of the Flies.
If you feel the need to recivilize your class, check it out.
Links
- Free Video Course Sign Up : https://forms.aweber.com/form/34/1733538234.htm
- Lord of the Flies Blog Post
- Complete Lesson Plans Collections: https://trent-media.myshopify.com/
