A Favorite Lesson

One of my favorite things about being a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant is that I frequently am called upon to talk about Alabama and the South. Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach about topics ranging from Haper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" to life in the Bible Belt to Alabama's climate. This is both interesting and challenging because many (if not most) of my students knew nothing Alabama before I became their teaching assistant.

Perhaps my favorite of these is a lesson I taught to a ninth grade class around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. As you can probably guess, I gave them a short biography to read and a worksheet to do for homework, and I also had them listen to his "I Have a Dream" speech. The next week, their teacher and I gave them a list of vocabulary words such as 'freedom' and 'equality' that were found in the speech. Then, we split them into groups and instructed them to pretend that they were leaders of the civil rights movement following in Dr. King's footsteps after his death and write a speech of their own. One person from each group had to give the speech their group had written in front of the entire class. They did an amazing job on the speeches, and they really seemed to enjoying listening to each other speak. It was obvious that they truly understood both the importance of the Civil Rights Movement and the ideals of Dr. King.