2/9/2019 0 Comments Memes, What About Them?It’s a rather normal day in my 7th-grade classroom. Students are in their third month of school and we are somewhat comfortable with each other now. There’s a hum in the room as students grab their class copy Chromebook device and their new English textbooks from CollegeBoard’s SpringBoard company.
As students make their way to their seats I find myself smiling. I am giving my best Hollywood facial expression because the lesson I am about to teach my 7th graders has quickly become one of my favorites. It is the lesson that makes me feel more connected to my students than anything else I will teach them in our year together. The focus? Memes. There are a wide variety of ways to define the loaded word “meme” and it really depends on who you are talking to when you ask the question, what is a meme? As a 25-year-old educator, I feel like I have a good grasp on the concept, but I am always up for broadening my own knowledge on a topic. Which is why I turn to Medium writer Hugo who wrote an incredibly insightful and interesting piece in April of last year titled “Memes and Museums.” In his article, he opened with a brief explanation of memes in its most basic form. The word “meme” was first coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene” (1976), as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. In short, memes are a source of discussion that help spread the topics that are presented in our culture. They spread fast too and in different ways. Many people communicate these ideas by making images with text making fun of or explaining the idea. Memes have a life of their own, but how can memes be used in a 7th grade English classroom? Well, let me take you back to that day I began class with a big smile. My students were confused at first, not because I am not a smiling teacher but because I opened the lesson with the word “meme.” Several minutes thereafter we dove into an activity embedded near the middle of the first unit in SpringBoard. Our topic of study was the nuance of tone words such as happy, sad, excited, angry, etc. We discussed the difference between denotation and connotation. We focused our time on understanding that we all approach the meaning of words differently. Enter the memes. As a part of the lesson, I took the curriculum a step further. I told students they were going to be placed in small groups. Within their groups, they were given a tone word (such as happy) and a list of connotative words that represented the denotation of the word happy — think thrilled, ecstatic, etc. Once they ordered the words from least to most intense in terms of tone they were to contribute to a collaborative Google Slides presentation. Now, just imagine 30 students all on the same document at the same time. Ideally, a great forward thinking lesson. In reality, a little chaotic. So, I needed a source of focus for my 7th graders. Something that would keep them from wanting to create a private group chat on the presentation. Or change the theme of the slides because it was funny. Enter the memes. Once students determined the order of their tone words their task was to create, as a group, a slide for each of the tone words. On the slides, they were required to include the word, its definition, its part of speech, and a meme or image related to the word. I have never heard so much laughter in my room over the course of the next few days than I did when we worked on these slides. Students were laughing so hard they were crying. As they left the room after the first day of work I overheard students saying, “this was the best class ever” “I’ve never laughed so hard in my life” and “I love English!” The next day students wrapped up their work and presented their slides as a group. The laughter amongst groups lead to laughter as a class and suddenly the vibe changed from scary presentation to a warm, loving environment of people laughing at memes. The kicker as the teacher? My students were learning vocabulary. There are many issues still to be worked out when it comes to this lesson, but my hope is that this lesson continues to draw students into the learning of language and words. For as long as memes are cool, that is.
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Ms. Pratt7th Grade English teacher at Heatherwood Middle School. Advocate of student-led lessons and differentiated instruction. Archives
January 2021
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Photos used under Creative Commons from Theo Crazzolara, kennethkonica