My sixth hour is 33 minutes away from being finished with their midterm exam in my class as I type this. They seem to be doing pretty well, no terrified faces or anything. I always thought taking multiple choice exams was really fun myself, but I don't blame them for not being excited about the essay portion.
I worry about a few students across all of the classes who are barely passing though. This is accelerated American Studies, which is supposed to mean that students fall above average, but below advanced. A lot of the times, I see kids who should be in AP (but I'm glad they're here), and I see kids who belong in regular AS. I feel like parents pressure their kids too much to be the best at everything. Maybe this is so they can brag to other parents. Maybe they just refuse to believe their kids are "just average" in some subjects. And it may not even be every subject; it could be that some of these kids rock in math and science, but they have trouble with the memorization and chronology aspects of history. There's no shame in it. And it's not that I don't want these kids in my class, because I do. But I also want to see them do their best and be able to UNDERSTAND, rather than struggle, struggle, struggle to barely get a D- and not retain anything. And frankly, sometimes a kid really can do the work and really is that intelligent, but he/she just has other crap going on that distracts him/her from schoolwork. I wish they would see that getting a B or C in a regular class looks a lot better to colleges and feels a lot better to a kid than getting a D- in an accelerated class, especially where he/she is surrounded by students who get A's on a regular basis and are disappointed by getting a B on a 5-pt assignment.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Gettin' Busy
I am so stoked right now. I hope the students really like my WWII unit, because I'm so excited to teach it! Today I found all these fabulous resources on Japanese Internment in the US. I actually got it from the Wisconsin Historical Society. I love Wisconsin, so this must be fate. :-) (P.S. If you haven't visited Wisconsin, go do it as soon as you can! They are the NICEST people in the world!)
Anyway, Japanese Internment...So I found that Dr Seuss actually drew a cartoon to target the Japanese in America. I think I'm going to give this to the kids to help them get a feeling of the fear, distrust, and ignorance of the time.
Crazy, right?
I love working with images in my classroom though. I think pictures can be so powerful. Look at this one from the Japanese bombing raids during the Battle of Shanghai:
This picture reached the US during WWII and shocked the American public. This was not a coincidence. The rescue worker who found this baby under the wreckage after this bombing raid set him up on the platform specifically to take this picture and show the horrors of this war in Asia.
During the Myth Busters lesson I mentioned in my last post, I will use images for each slide. Some of them are more powerful than others. My recent favorites are these pictures of Auschwitz survivors posing to show their tattoos.
I hope my kids can appreciate photography and art like this. Again, images can be so powerful. Even though we're American History, we're looking at the Holocaust as an attack on civilians, along with the Rape of Nanjing and the A bombs and Japanese Internment. I once took a class on Concentration Camps and Penal Colonies, which gave me insight into some of the camp mentalities, so those are very interesting to compare. But then if we think of these camps as civilian targets, we can also connect them to acts of war at the time, and this helps dispel some of the romanticism surrounding America in the war. I can't tell students what to think of the war, but I am not going to sugarcoat anything. There were a lot of great things that the US did, and there were a lot of bad things too. This is war, after all. My hope is to create an engaging unit that will open up this era for their own exploration. There's no way we can get through everything in three weeks, so I have to make sure that every lesson really counts for something.
Anyway, Japanese Internment...So I found that Dr Seuss actually drew a cartoon to target the Japanese in America. I think I'm going to give this to the kids to help them get a feeling of the fear, distrust, and ignorance of the time.
Crazy, right?
I love working with images in my classroom though. I think pictures can be so powerful. Look at this one from the Japanese bombing raids during the Battle of Shanghai:
This picture reached the US during WWII and shocked the American public. This was not a coincidence. The rescue worker who found this baby under the wreckage after this bombing raid set him up on the platform specifically to take this picture and show the horrors of this war in Asia.
During the Myth Busters lesson I mentioned in my last post, I will use images for each slide. Some of them are more powerful than others. My recent favorites are these pictures of Auschwitz survivors posing to show their tattoos.
I hope my kids can appreciate photography and art like this. Again, images can be so powerful. Even though we're American History, we're looking at the Holocaust as an attack on civilians, along with the Rape of Nanjing and the A bombs and Japanese Internment. I once took a class on Concentration Camps and Penal Colonies, which gave me insight into some of the camp mentalities, so those are very interesting to compare. But then if we think of these camps as civilian targets, we can also connect them to acts of war at the time, and this helps dispel some of the romanticism surrounding America in the war. I can't tell students what to think of the war, but I am not going to sugarcoat anything. There were a lot of great things that the US did, and there were a lot of bad things too. This is war, after all. My hope is to create an engaging unit that will open up this era for their own exploration. There's no way we can get through everything in three weeks, so I have to make sure that every lesson really counts for something.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Victory! And other updates.
It's a small victory for the class as a whole, but a huge victory for one kid. We recently played a stock market game (that of course led to the Great Depression), so the students were split up in groups, which my mentor assigned before break, when they started the game. One student had been sitting alone prior to this game and didn't socialize much. Today, he's still sitting with his group, even though the game is long over; I see them pounding fists and giving high fives, both of his other group mates telling him he's awesome. Yay!
I've been planning a lot of lessons lately. One lesson I'm especially excited about is our Myth Busters day. I'm splitting the classes into multiple groups, and I'm going to put a myth on the overhead (I have a sweet power point made up for it) with things like "True or false? Millions of men rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor, making up a mostly-volunteer military." (The answer is false. 60% of the military for WWII was drafted, and the draft had actually begun before Pearl Harbor.) So then the groups will have about 30 seconds to talk amongst themselves and bring their answer up to me on a piece of paper. Then the scores will be tallied, and the group with the highest score at the end will get some extra credit pts or cookies or something. I chose to have the kids bring the paper up to me, because I think that shouting out answers can get really unruly, and I don't want them looking at other groups and basing their answer on what popular opinion says. But I hope they're still lively and excited about it. This is supposed to be a fun and relaxing day for everyone. :-)
I'm also beginning to realize how hard it can be to choose lessons for a unit like WWII. I mean, for the Great Depression or the 1890s, there's kind of a formula for what you teach. But WWII is so huge. I studied it for 4 years in college, and I still never got to the Pacific conflict! But I do know that a lot of kids got to the war in Europe in World History, so I am focusing on the Home Front, the Pacific conflict, and a series of controversial issues surrounding the era (specifically Civilian targets--holocaust, Japanese internment, the Rape of Nanjing, the A-Bombs). We're reading a lot of primary resources and having a lot of discussions about these issues. In particular, we're reading these three primary resources from the holocaust (an excerpt from Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz," which is kind of cliche, but they haven't read it before), from the Rape of Nanjing, and from Hiroshima. They're all very eye-opening, and my hope is that it will de-romanticize some of these events that have not been properly placed in context for them. People always talk about how justified the A-bombs were, but they never really pay close attention to what it actually did, aside from bringing an end to the War.
I'm also having them write a "Taking a Stance" essay on whether or not they thought Japanese internment was justified. They will need to back up their claim with three pieces of evidence and respond to why someone might think the opposite. (The format is more for working on writing essays, not so much for the topic, but I think it will work well with this and make their organization better.) And their overall assessment is to write a letter, acting as themselves during WWII, to their grandchildren or to future generations, telling them what to remember from WWII. My hope is that each of them will take their own situation during the time into account when they write this. So I want my female students to write from the perspective of a woman and my Black students to write from that perspective of the time. But I'm not sure if that will be good as a total assessment for the unit. I'll have to think about that a bit more.
Finally, I think we're doing a huge series of projects next semester, called "Teach Me." Students will get a list of topics that we're not covering in the class due to time or curriculum constraints, and they can pick one and do a project on it. Right now, I'm thinking that they're going to do some sort of visual thing, like a scrapbook or poster, so that we can keep it up in the room and all the classes can look at it. They'll also give a presentation to their class. But this isn't just for one unit. Students can pick a topic from a range of units. So on the list will be things like Holocaust Art, Blues Music, Roe v. Wade. And the students will be able to choose their own topic outside of the list, as long as they clear it with us to make sure we're not already covering it. But maybe if that's the case, we'll just let them teach that part to the class. The idea is that they teach something that the class may not know, and hopefully stuff that Mr. Richards and I don't know! And I'd like to see them have the freedom to do something meaningful to them and really let history come alive in their own hands.
All-in-all, I'm pretty excited about next semester. We just have to get through exams, and I'll be a pretty happy camper!
I've been planning a lot of lessons lately. One lesson I'm especially excited about is our Myth Busters day. I'm splitting the classes into multiple groups, and I'm going to put a myth on the overhead (I have a sweet power point made up for it) with things like "True or false? Millions of men rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor, making up a mostly-volunteer military." (The answer is false. 60% of the military for WWII was drafted, and the draft had actually begun before Pearl Harbor.) So then the groups will have about 30 seconds to talk amongst themselves and bring their answer up to me on a piece of paper. Then the scores will be tallied, and the group with the highest score at the end will get some extra credit pts or cookies or something. I chose to have the kids bring the paper up to me, because I think that shouting out answers can get really unruly, and I don't want them looking at other groups and basing their answer on what popular opinion says. But I hope they're still lively and excited about it. This is supposed to be a fun and relaxing day for everyone. :-)
I'm also beginning to realize how hard it can be to choose lessons for a unit like WWII. I mean, for the Great Depression or the 1890s, there's kind of a formula for what you teach. But WWII is so huge. I studied it for 4 years in college, and I still never got to the Pacific conflict! But I do know that a lot of kids got to the war in Europe in World History, so I am focusing on the Home Front, the Pacific conflict, and a series of controversial issues surrounding the era (specifically Civilian targets--holocaust, Japanese internment, the Rape of Nanjing, the A-Bombs). We're reading a lot of primary resources and having a lot of discussions about these issues. In particular, we're reading these three primary resources from the holocaust (an excerpt from Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz," which is kind of cliche, but they haven't read it before), from the Rape of Nanjing, and from Hiroshima. They're all very eye-opening, and my hope is that it will de-romanticize some of these events that have not been properly placed in context for them. People always talk about how justified the A-bombs were, but they never really pay close attention to what it actually did, aside from bringing an end to the War.
I'm also having them write a "Taking a Stance" essay on whether or not they thought Japanese internment was justified. They will need to back up their claim with three pieces of evidence and respond to why someone might think the opposite. (The format is more for working on writing essays, not so much for the topic, but I think it will work well with this and make their organization better.) And their overall assessment is to write a letter, acting as themselves during WWII, to their grandchildren or to future generations, telling them what to remember from WWII. My hope is that each of them will take their own situation during the time into account when they write this. So I want my female students to write from the perspective of a woman and my Black students to write from that perspective of the time. But I'm not sure if that will be good as a total assessment for the unit. I'll have to think about that a bit more.
Finally, I think we're doing a huge series of projects next semester, called "Teach Me." Students will get a list of topics that we're not covering in the class due to time or curriculum constraints, and they can pick one and do a project on it. Right now, I'm thinking that they're going to do some sort of visual thing, like a scrapbook or poster, so that we can keep it up in the room and all the classes can look at it. They'll also give a presentation to their class. But this isn't just for one unit. Students can pick a topic from a range of units. So on the list will be things like Holocaust Art, Blues Music, Roe v. Wade. And the students will be able to choose their own topic outside of the list, as long as they clear it with us to make sure we're not already covering it. But maybe if that's the case, we'll just let them teach that part to the class. The idea is that they teach something that the class may not know, and hopefully stuff that Mr. Richards and I don't know! And I'd like to see them have the freedom to do something meaningful to them and really let history come alive in their own hands.
All-in-all, I'm pretty excited about next semester. We just have to get through exams, and I'll be a pretty happy camper!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Heart Warmers
I'm writing to brag about my second hour class. They are seriously some of the nicest kids I have ever met. I thought last week that I really loved the kids who sit near my desk and the rest who sit in the front, but then, looking around, I realized that I'd love to have any of these kids up front! They're all so bright and engaged in the content. Not everyone is a participant in discussions, but they're all listening intently and engaged in the conversation in some way.
One pair just said that they needed the reading for the day, but there weren't enough copies, so another pair offered to share their reading right away. Most of them get along really well, and there are groups, but not cliques, and most students are welcoming to new friends in the class.
I do worry about one student, who always sits alone. He doesn't make eye contact with anyone else in the class, and I worry that he may be lonely or feel like an outsider. Does he do this on purpose? Or do the other kids do this to him? :-/
That's not as heart warming, but the rest of it is.
One pair just said that they needed the reading for the day, but there weren't enough copies, so another pair offered to share their reading right away. Most of them get along really well, and there are groups, but not cliques, and most students are welcoming to new friends in the class.
I do worry about one student, who always sits alone. He doesn't make eye contact with anyone else in the class, and I worry that he may be lonely or feel like an outsider. Does he do this on purpose? Or do the other kids do this to him? :-/
That's not as heart warming, but the rest of it is.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Wrapping up the semester
So this semester has been pretty good in the placement. I really love my kids. They're all such bright individuals, and they've just started saying hi to me in the halls, which I think is a big deal, because before they were just ignoring me and hoping I wouldn't say hi to them. I even have one student who will stop and talk to me. I am such a dork. :-P But I also think that this is because I try really hard to relate to the kids on a professional-personal level. I'm their friend and teacher, but not their buddy or wanna-be buddy or authoritarian. There is a group of friends in one of my hours who has shifted from trying to be my buddies to trying not to draw attention to themselves when they do something obnoxious or wrong (they never succeed). This is because, before, they thought that they could get away with things because of my friendly demeanor with the students, but now I have also established myself as an authority figure, and I don't put up with their disruptive behavior. They don't like this, but the rest of the class respects me more than before, so tough cookies for them.
I also think that my teaching has strengthened through the advice of my mentor and field instructor. Simple things, like not losing the volume of my voice when I'm unsure, keep me looking confident and let the students trust my knowledge more. I also try to relate more to pop culture when it's possible in my examples. I like to loosen up the mood of the classroom and let students be themselves there.
I did recently find that many of my students plagiarize and then pretend not to know that they did it (even when copying and pasting from wikipedia). I was really disappointed to find that they would go to such great lengths to save their own grades, but not to do the actual work and learn and keep some semblance of integrity. This is not the first problem I've had with cheating in this class, and when I have more control over their grades, they will be very sorry to cheat. I'm going to make it clear the first day of my unit that if I catch anyone plagiarizing or copying, it will result in an immediate zero, no matter the assignment. (Maybe I'll secretly plan to let them off the hook with a second chance later, but they shouldn't know it's an option when they're doing their original work.) I let them know that plagiarism is illegal and will get them kicked out of college completely, but they still seem to be struggling to step up and do their own work.
More later, class just ended!
I also think that my teaching has strengthened through the advice of my mentor and field instructor. Simple things, like not losing the volume of my voice when I'm unsure, keep me looking confident and let the students trust my knowledge more. I also try to relate more to pop culture when it's possible in my examples. I like to loosen up the mood of the classroom and let students be themselves there.
I did recently find that many of my students plagiarize and then pretend not to know that they did it (even when copying and pasting from wikipedia). I was really disappointed to find that they would go to such great lengths to save their own grades, but not to do the actual work and learn and keep some semblance of integrity. This is not the first problem I've had with cheating in this class, and when I have more control over their grades, they will be very sorry to cheat. I'm going to make it clear the first day of my unit that if I catch anyone plagiarizing or copying, it will result in an immediate zero, no matter the assignment. (Maybe I'll secretly plan to let them off the hook with a second chance later, but they shouldn't know it's an option when they're doing their original work.) I let them know that plagiarism is illegal and will get them kicked out of college completely, but they still seem to be struggling to step up and do their own work.
More later, class just ended!
A poor example, but a good lesson.
I recently saw an example of teaching that really bothered me. This is a person who constantly disrupts class to nit pick little things. Like if a student is trying to find a notebook in his/her backpack, she will stop class to say, "Ok, what's going on? Right, right. Well, are we okay now?" I feel like it's a really big waste of class time to disrupt the entire class and call out a person she perceives as disrupting the class, but who could have just found the notebook within ten seconds and the class would never have noticed.
This was a good lesson in picking one's battles in the classroom. I feel like you set examples with big disruptions and let kids know the consequences if they're going to be disruptive there on. But to nit pick on little things that do no harm, like finding a notebook that only has the attention of one or two students, is really counter productive in setting an example of proper conduct. So we need to be careful in picking our battles, so as not to exemplify the behavior we try to stop.
This was a good lesson in picking one's battles in the classroom. I feel like you set examples with big disruptions and let kids know the consequences if they're going to be disruptive there on. But to nit pick on little things that do no harm, like finding a notebook that only has the attention of one or two students, is really counter productive in setting an example of proper conduct. So we need to be careful in picking our battles, so as not to exemplify the behavior we try to stop.
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