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English Education Lesson Plan Worksheet

Teacher: Eric Liu, Ryan Parkes, Milo Sussman
Lesson Plan Title:
Subject:
Grade Level:
Date of Lesson:
Format (synchronous in person, synchronous online, asynchronous online):

I. Pre-Instructional Planning
Student Learning Objective(s):
(Student learning outcomes.)
-​ Students will learn how to craft and analyze memoir,
●​ What are the specific skills
and processes students will learn in this
looking at a variety of examples that embody different
lesson? styles and structures.
●​ What is the specific content -​ Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name will serve as a
and concepts students will explore/learn model for potential visions of memoir.
in this lesson?

Standard(s):*
●​ What standard(s) are most
relevant to the learning objective(s) of
this lesson?
(Align with Learning Objective(s).)

*Select no more than 3.

Lesson Rationale: -​ Create parameters that explicate the qualities of a memoir

●​ Why are you teaching this -​ Provide an aperture to constructing a narrative for the
lesson? Why are the learning tasks for
specific genre
this lesson appropriate for your
students?
●​ How does this lesson connect
to what comes before and after it?

Prior Knowledge:
●​ What prior knowledge and -​ Students will have read several memoirs in this course,
skills do these students have that
presumably…They will have an understanding of plot
supports the learning for this lesson?
How do you know? structure, tone, and mood.
●​ What prior knowledge and
skills do these students need to have to
support the learning for this lesson?
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Materials:
●​ What materials does the
teacher need for this lesson?
●​ What materials do the
students need for this lesson?

Differentiation/Tiered Activities/Planned Support for All Learners:

●​ How does your instructional design for this lesson

meet individual and group needs?

●​ How will you provide enrichment for students with

a strong understanding of the lesson concepts?

●​ How did you modify materials for ELLs, students

with IEPs or 504 plans? (NOTE: teachers are legally
obligated to address learning needs of students with IEPs or
504 plans)

Assessments:

●​ How will you determine if

students are meeting the intended
learning objective(s) in the course of the
lesson?

●​ What feedback do you plan to

provide to students? And how?

II. Plan for Instruction

Strategies and Learning Tasks:

Description of what the teacher (you) will be doing and/or what the students will be doing. The questions in the boxes are not
meant to be answered directly but are there to guide your thinking and planning.
Opening/Introduction: Aim: Students will investigate examples of memoir and generate working
definitions of the genre.
Lesson Aim: How will you frame the
Aim (the purpose) of the lesson to your The purpose of the lesson is to broaden students’ understanding of memoir,
students? providing a variety of entry points for their own projects.
(Lesson #__Aim: What is the purpose of
today’s lesson? The aim will be on the board for reference for the duration of the period, they will
-Choose ONE Aim that is achievable in the be tasked with a specific definition of memoir at the beginning and end of class.
amount of time for Lesson #__.)
Do Now: Work in your tables to form a working definition of memoir.
Student Learning Objective(s): How (Consider: any memoirs you’ve read, what do they have in common? How are they
will you communicate to students what different?)
they will be able to do at the end of the
lesson (SWBAT)?

Engagement/Motivation/
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Do Now: How will you start the lesson

to engage and motivate students in
learning?

Instruction/Steps of the Lesson:

Steps:
●​ How will you link the new
content (skills, strategies, concepts) to
-​ A possible entry point is comparing this form of writing to a
students’ prior academic learning and more structured and mastered style like the five paragraph
previous lesson(s). essay.
●​ What learning activities do -​ Students work in groups to write a preliminary definition of
you have planned?
memoir.
●​ What kind of
examples/models will you provide for -​ Then, together as a class we read the two sections from the
your students? Sante memoir.
●​ What opportunities will you -​ Students reflect in small groups on different strategies used
provide for students to practice/apply in these two excerpts.
the new content (skills, strategies,
concepts)?
-​ Introduce the many avenues of memoir writing
●​ How will you link the new (chronological, tangential, reflective, hyperbolic,
content (skills, strategies, concepts) to fragmented).
students’ personal/cultural and -​ Full class discussion: What are the certain benefits and
community assets?
detractors of different approaches to memoir writing?
●​ How will you transition
smoothly from one learning activity to
the next?

Closure: -​ As an exit ticket, students respond to the EQ once again, this

●​ How will the key points of time contextualizing what approach would best support their
the lesson be articulated? By whom?
●​ What questions or prompts
own individual goals.
will you use to elicit student -​
articulation of their learning?

Homework/Extension: Students will come to the following class with a clear concept of their memoir
●​ How can you provide an assessment, ready to workshop with their table groups.
opportunity to reinforce or expand on
students’ learning in this lesson?

Flexibility: If students have trouble identifying their own individual memoir, a sheet of
(What if…??) prompting questions is available on request to help narrow the focus.ef
●​ What might not go as
planned and how can you be ready to
make adjustments?

Sources/Resources:
Acknowledge and cite any sources used in developing this lesson.
Attach handouts, materials and each assessment and associated evaluation criteria/rubric.

Lesson plan template adapted from TPAC Online: http://tpaconline.ning.com/page/edtpa-resource-series

“Sometime in the early weeks of my transition I began hearing snatches of a song in my head, a song I
had written the words to. Or rather, a prose poem I wrote in 1978, when I was twenty-four, that a couple
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of years later was set to music by Phil Kline and eventually recorded by the Del-Byzanteens, a band that
also included Jim Jarmusch, Philippe Bordaz, and Jamie Nares, all friends of mine. The poem was called
“Easy Touch,” although for some reason I changed the title for the song version to “Girls Imagination.” I
had seen on the UK charts a listing for a lovers rock girl-group cover of the Temptations’ “Just My
Imagination,” which was titled “Girls Imagination.” The group was called 15-16-17, after their ages. I
was charmed by the title’s missing apostrophe, which made it interestingly ambiguous: it could represent
the imagination of one or more girls, or refer to the way the imagination is set off by girls, or indeed
equate the propositions “girls” and “imagination.” My friends’ song, a trancelike western raga after the
manner of the Kinks’ “See My Friends,” appeared on a twelve-inch single “and the one album by the
Del-Byzanteens, and on the soundtrack of a film by Wim Wenders, The State of Things.

I rarely thought about it anymore. When songs drifted into my internal airspace for no good reason—I
hadn’t heard them at the supermarket or the movies or on my iPod—I always wondered why they would
choose that moment to climb into my head. In this case the words came back to me as if they had been
written by someone else, and I turned them over as I mentally replayed them.

There was a remarkable slow movement she did with her hands, circling halves of what would have been
her face, as if trying to mold one out of ectoplasm. The ruined girly look she wore was completely the
effect of the thin cream plastic mask that sat over. Pulling away, a robe would leave imprints on newly ”
“grafted skin, so strange to be someone lifelike but too early. First movies became longer and longer, and
then movies loved her back.
It was the beginning of a new dream which was real life, or the manifestation of an old one at its cusp.
She imagined they took her in a white car to a room in a club and the touch was given to her. The other
women looked back at her, but they were sisters under the mink. She threw off the red cape and sang:
There’s no use walking in just a shirt
When baby’s got on her animal feet,
And there’s no point to a lot of business
When what you mean is nobody home.
Then they pulled on the cords attached to her legs and she became bigger and bigger. Then bluish
fingernails on soft, sticky piano keys.
I was stunned. The whole thing was about transitioning! How had that passed my internal censor? At the
time I thought I was weaving a vague reverie based on two movies, Eyes Without a Face by Georges
Franju and The Big Heat by Fritz Lang; the “thin cream plastic mask” comes from the first and “sisters
under the mink” from the second. Both films feature the disfigurement of the female protagonist. I’ve
always been frankly in awe of my subconscious, which pulls off the damnedest things when least
expected. If I were in a 12-step program it would be my higher power. Here it had smuggled in a whole
scenario I had rarely managed to explore even in the privacy of my own imagination, as terrified as I was
of the implications. I shivered at the words “so strange to be someone lifelike but too early,” which
perfectly described the state I found myself in then, and sometimes still do. It was nothing less than a
founding myth, a sort of robing of the bride, an alchemical transformation from male to female, sealed by
the recognition and approval of other women. And is that actually a clitoris in the last sentence?
My subconscious was attuned to my being and my desires in a way that my conscious mind couldn’t
afford. The sophistication of my repressive mechanism can be gauged by the fact that I was able to write
those words, show them to my friends, hear them set to music, hear them sung “ive dozens of times and
on record in two formats, print them in a chapbook I made of my early poetry in 2009—and not once
tumble to their real subject, which seems unmistakable to me now. For that matter, look at the refrain of
the other song I wrote for the Del-Byzanteens, the title track of their album Lies to Live By: “If I only
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have one life, let me live it as a lie.” Note that it hijacks a ubiquitous Clairol commercial from the 1970s:
“If I only have one life, let me live it as a blonde.” The conflict is spelled out so explicitly you’d think I
would have noticed.

Excerpt From
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition
Lucy Sante
This material may be protected by copyright.

“Who am I? is a question I’ve been trying to resolve for the better part of my life, even without reference
to matters of gender. The putative answer is both specific and elusive. I’m a writer before I’m anything
else. I’m European and American, poised midway between those poles in both attitude and citizenship
status. I’m a Walloon, pretty much 100 percent, a thoroughbred specimen of one of the world’s more
overlooked ethnic groups, overlooked in part because they seldom seem to stray from home. (Over the
course of fifty years I’ve met no more than three in the United States.) I’m an only child, with few
surviving relatives. I’m a father of one. I’m an ex-boyfriend and an ex-husband twice. I’m a retired
professor (very part-time at that). I’m a visual artist in seasons when the visual-arts moon is high in the
sky. I’m a homeowner. I’m a registered Democrat, but my political leanings range somewhat left of
that—although everything is such a mess now that I no longer bother trying to specify exactly where. I’m
not a member of any club or organization, except a hundred-member online chat group I joined at its start
in 2007.”

Excerpt From
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition
Lucy Sante
This material may be protected by copyright.

Excerpt From
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition
Lucy Sante
This material may be protected by copyright.