1. Big Disclaimer to start here: Before I arrived here, the students were accidentally taught an A10 unit and a B10 unit in their ELA A10 course. This semester, in their ELA B10 course, they’ve taken a (second) B10 unit so I’ve decided to give them a treat and teach an A10 unit, so things are back in balance. The A10 courses are not as “heavy or deep” as the B10 courses (A10 is theme based and B10 is issues based), so they deserve a bit of a break and we can enjoy some interesting topics and stories until our end comes in June.
2. We started our unit on The Unknown today by looking at the four main sub-units we will consider: Mystery and Suspense, The Unexplained, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Because students still need to study Macbeth, we will take that B10 play in our A10 unit, but it will fit in quite nicely in our discussion of Fantasy fiction.
3. Students were given a handout that clearly shows the material we will cover before the end of the school year. We had a good discussion about the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction genres and then we watched a few short videos and students had to write down which of the four sub-units each topic would fit under. For example, we watched the short clip of Magician David Blaine who just beat the world record for holding his breath under water for seventeen minutes. How this could be real is hard to fathom. Does it fit under Science fiction (but it’s not fiction, Fantasy (no mythical creaters were involved and there’s no real quest between good and evil), the Unexplained (although science says it’s possible) so then it must be Mystery and Suspense. What’s the trick? We’ll likely never know!
4. We began reading a short story in class together. Students were asked to have finished reading it for class tomorrow.

Here is an example of one of the videos were looked at today. Which sub-unit would you classify this in?