INSTRUCTIONAL CHOICES TO HEIGHTEN INDONESIAN STUDENTS' MOTIVATION AND ENGAGEMENT IN READING ENGLISH CANONICAL TEXTS
This paper focuses on how to motivate my struggling students for whom English is a second language when they read canonical texts written in English. Students in English departments are required to read English canonical texts, but most of them find this task very challenging. One strategy teachers can use to motivate students to read is to pair the English canonical texts with young adult texts. Important in these instructional choices are the pre-reading, during-reading, and after-reading activities. Pre-reading activities are intended to prepare readers to enter the story world During-reading activities are important to make students understand the stories better. Some of the duringactivities include using role plays and teaching media to increase students' understanding of the characters and the plots in the books. In the post-reading activities, students can write journals or quotes they find interesting from the book. Giving students more varieties in book choices and activities can, hopefully, make them independent good readers.
Easing the Pain of the Classics
Few words strike more fear in the hearts and minds of high school students than the English teacher's announcement, "We will be reading a classic." Truth be told, as an English teacher, I dreaded The Scarlet Letter and Silas Marner as much as the students, not because I didn't recognize these works as fine and deserving literature, but because I knew that I would be pulling metaphorical teeth trying to get my students to read them. As a school librarian and keeper of the school's laptops, I observe the constant use of Sparknotes with empathy for the struggling readers. As Don Gallo points out, "The classics are not about teenage concerns! They are about adult issues. Moreover, they were written for educated adults who had the leisure and time to read them. They were incidentally, written to be enjoyed--not dissected, not analyzed, and certainly not tested." (Gallo, p. 34) But what do educators do? We discuss, quiz, and test the books to death, as the students' eyes glaze over and they recall just enough to pass the test. Yet the classics are with us and will certainly remain with us for some time. No one can argue that they teach a certain discipline in reading, which helps to prepare high school students for the more rigorous reading they will face in college. Students will expand their vocabulary and gain cultural literacy by recognizing the relevancy of quotes such as "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times" from Tale of Two Cities. Finally, educators and administrators feel obligated to keep the classics on the syllabus of honors and Advanced Placement (AP) English classes. So how do we, as librarians, soften that blow? How can we ease the pain? How can we help to make a connection between a one-hundred-year-old novel and a sixteen-year-old student? One solution is the pairing of a classic with a young adult (YA) novel. Recently, a plethora of quality YA novels complementing classic novels have been published. These fall into five general categories: * Novels with an alternate or modern setting; * Novels with an alternate narrator or point of view; * Novels serving as prequels or sequels to classics; * Time-travel novels, in which a character finds him or her self in a classic setting; and * Companion novels that serve to enrich the lessons of the classic. Lord of the Hies by William Golding is a staple of most high school curricula. It tells the story of teenage boys suddenly in a world without adults. Similarly, in Gone by Michael Grant, everyone over the age of fifteen suddenly and inexplicably disappears. Set in a modern beach town in California, the first act of rebellion is fifth graders breaking into the candy machine. Still, as the main character Sam observes, "This school was dangerous now. Scared people did scary things sometimes, even kids.... Fear could be dangerous. Fear could get people hurt. And there was nothing but fear running crazy through the school." (Grant, p. 11). Like Ralph in Lord of the Hies, the protagonist Sam is a sensible and resourceful young man, thrown into a position of responsibility and facing opposition from the Jack-like bully, referred to as Caine and his sadistic Roger-like henchman, Drake. He is witness to the power struggles and brutality illustrated in Lord of the Hies. Like Ralph, he must remain the voice of calm reason amid the rampant cruelty of his youthful companions. Ringside 1925: Views from the Scopes Monkey Trial by Jen Bryant takes the perspective of the residents of Dayton, Tennessee, with particular focus on the students of Rhea County High School as the trials portrayed in the play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee begin. Written in the free verse so favored by today's teens, alternating narrators tell the story of the teacher who dared to break the brand new Butler Act, a Tennessee law making it illegal to teach evolution in the science class. …
Size-selective neuronal changes in the anterior optic pathways suggest a differential susceptibility to injury in multiple sclerosis.
Axonal damage is found in both acute and chronic lesions of multiple sclerosis. Direct axon counting in post-mortem tissue has suggested that smaller axons might have a greater susceptibility to damage, but methodological limitations have precluded unequivocal interpretation. However, as neuronal and axonal sizes are linked and neuronal changes would be expected with retrograde or transsynaptic degeneration following axon injury, we hypothesized that an alternative strategy for studying this phenomenon would be to define multiple sclerosis-associated changes in neurones. To test this hypothesis, we measured both axonal loss and neuronal size changes in the anterior optic pathway [including the optic nerve (ON), optic tract (OT) and lateral geniculate nucleus] of the brains of eight patients who died with multiple sclerosis and in eight control brains. The ONs and OTs in brains from the multiple sclerosis patients showed a trend to smaller mean cross-sectional areas (ON, multiple sclerosis = 6.84 mm(2), controls = 9.25 mm(2); and OT, multiple sclerosis = 6.45 mm(2), controls = 7.94 mm(2), P = 0.08) and had reduced axonal densities (ON, multiple sclerosis = 1.1 x 10(5)/mm(2), controls = 1.7 x 10(5)/mm(2); and OT, multiple sclerosis = 1.4 x 10(5)/mm(2), controls = 1.8 x 10(5)/mm(2), P = 0.006). Estimated total axonal counts were reduced by 32 (OT)-45% (ON) in the patients relative to controls (ON, multiple sclerosis = 8.1 x 10(5) axons, controls = 14.8 x10(5), P = 0.05; and OT, multiple sclerosis = 9.1 x 10(5), controls = 13.3 x 10(5), P = 0.02). The size distributions of the magnocellular cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus were similar for the two groups, but in multiple sclerosis brains the parvocellular cells were significantly smaller (mean sizes: multiple sclerosis = 226 microm(2), controls = 230 microm(2), P < 0.001) and had a larger variation in size, suggesting a greater proportion of atrophic neurones. Axon loss in the optic nerves of multiple sclerosis patients correlated strongly with measures of increased dispersion of cell sizes in the parvocellular layer (r = 0.8, P < 0.04). These data demonstrate that both atrophy and decreased density contribute to the substantial axonal loss in the anterior visual pathway of these patients. This appears related to a relatively selective atrophy of the smaller neurones of the parvocellular layer in the lateral geniculate nucleus, supporting the hypothesis that smaller axons may be preferentially susceptible to injury in multiple sclerosis.