Month: June 2008

Boom de yada

Come on a digital journey with me

Stop 1: Watch this

Stop 2: Read this

Stop 3: Listen to this: click

Stop 4: Get the idea to make a derivative video and song about myself! Because I’m a narcissist! And it sounds like hella fun! Yeah! And heck, maybe I could show it to my class on the first day of school as an introduction.

Stop 5: Watch this

Take the truism about playing around with technology to heart: yeah, it’s fun, but if you’re going to use it in the classroom, make sure it’s for the students and not (only) for your own narcissistic pleasure… schools tend not to discriminate between good and bad uses of technology in the classroom… “you’re good if you use it, whether it results in student understanding or not”… don’t get sucked into that praise.

Stop 6: Seriously decide to learn how to deal with sound, images, and video. I want to go from having learned to do this…

…to get to someplace better, and to turn that into something teaching-&-learning related. Pictures and sound and videos are powerful resources. Not only do they have the power to make something more interesting, but they have the power to make something more memorable and understandable. Or at least get you to ask questions. Case in point, make the next stop.

Stop 7: Watch this.

Can’t get a better opening hook than that. (And you don’t even need to say anything.) You know how I know? Because I thought, as you probably thought, “Awesome,” followed by a “What the heck?!” and “How’d that happen?!”

Now all I need is a lot of spare time to fiddle around with my computer. And a video camera. And to get over my fear of seeing and hearing myself electronically.

Teaching Boot Camp is Over

I returned from new teacher boot camp (read: Collegiate Summer Teaching Institute) and I’m exhausted. It was intense, and we did a lot of work, had a lot of fun, and I think I came out a better teacher. I know I came out knowing myself and my craft better — which is almost the same thing.

I might post some final reflection about the experience (namely, the part that was most revealing to me was being a student again, and all that came along with that). But I would definitely say if you know any people of color (and that doesn’t mean only black, but it means everything from asian to hispanic to half-this-half-that) who are thinking of going into teaching in the independent school world, or have one or two years under their belt and want to hone their craft, it might be worth shooting off an email to them at least they know about this program.

Some neat ideas for an English class

I was catching up on some of my olde internet haunts, and came across two posts in kottke.org which are definitely “things that make you go hmmmm.”

(1) Winners of the Penguin book design contest

(2) Books summed in 3 lines or less

The Great Gatsby

NICK: I love being rich and white.

GATSBY: Me, too, but I’d kill for the love of a woman.

DAISY: We can work with that.

Both could be parlayed into great exercises for students.

The first could be an assignment for a high school English class — create a book cover for the novel which exemplifies the theme, mood, or a pivotal moment in the book. Write a page explaining your design. (Of course, there are a number of students who aren’t artists, nor do they know how to use design programs, so I think it would have to be one of a couple choices of projects/assignments for the class.) I don’t know why, exactly, but I love the idea.

The second could be used as a “do now”, or an class discussion opener for summer reading. Give everyone five or six minutes to condense the book to what they think is essential. Then use those wee bits, and the differences among them, to lead into a discussion of the book itself and its themes. (I suppose that after the book unit is over, it might be interesting to have students re-write their three lines if they think they are different.)

Look ma, teaching ideas are everywhere!

Demo Lessons at Boot Camp

So today we start teaching our demo lessons to real students at New Teacher Boot Camp. We continue teaching demo lessons tomorrow too. I don’t have a lot to say, except for some reason, I’m super nervous. I know I’ll never see these kids again (they volunteer to come in for community service credit for their community service requirement), and I know my performance doesn’t really matter in the long run, but I’m nervous nonetheless.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that they are there specifically to evaluate me, and the tables have turned. I’m not the only one doing the evaluation. Maybe it’s the fact that some of my new teaching peers are going to be watching me teach too. I don’t know. But hopefully it’ll be over soon enough!

Having your class create their own museum guide

It wasn’t my idea; I won’t take credit for it. But honest, I heard about it so long ago — maybe when I wasn’t even a teacher, even! — that I can’t give credit. But I stole it and modified it and used it.

We had to plan and execute a field trip for some location in New York City in my teacher boot camp. My group chose, after a failed attempt to quickly plan something around social action and conservation in Central Park, to go to the Brooklyn Museum for an pretend 11th or 12th grade English class. (But it could be exported to a history or art history class too.)

The Background: The class has been in the middle of a poetry unit, and haslearned to analyze poetry through a three step process. Step 1 is observational and literal, to note things about a poem without interpretation (e.g. the poem has a rhyme scheme, the poem uses a lot of ‘sh’ sounds, the poem is about an old tree). Step 2 is interpretive, to note things about a poem that are symbolic, metaphorical, emotional, thematic, etc (e.g. the poem seems to imply that the solid tree is like mankind, the ‘sh’ sounds enhance the softness of the poem). Step 3 is context, what is the purpose of the poem, why was it created, what is the larger set of debates that it engages in.

The trip to the museum is to show students that they can apply this same analytic method to art. So we’re assuming, for the sake of the fake field trip we planned, that students had been exposed to applying it to art, by us modeling it for them and then them trying it out.

The Trip: The gist of the trip goes like this. Students go to the museum and each gets an hour to just wander around looking for three or four pieces that speak to them in some way. It could be that it angered them, bored them, was generally pleasurable for them, etc. Then they meet a teacher stationed somewhere in the museum who then tells them to pick two objects to analyze. (They chose 3-4 pieces because we don’t want two students doing the same piece — first come first serve!) They have a worksheet which takes them through doing the three-step process for both objects which they have an another hour to fill out. Finally, they get extra time to wander about and enjoy the rest of the museum.

Back at School: Back at school, students learn how to do research on their artist and on their art piece. They gather some information which can help them with understanding Step 3 (context). When they are done, and they have fully analyzed the piece, they are charged with creating two podcasts for a museum goer — explaining their two pieces. They can be creative — it doesn’t have to be the dry, boring explanation of some curator. It could be funny, or a dialogue, or anything! But it should express the student’s reaction and analytic interpretation of the piece.

Finally, the teacher puts all the podcasts together and creates a museum guide for others to listen to!

It’s a big project, with lots of work for the teacher, but the end result is hopefully something that the kids will go back to the museum to listen to their friends, and that their parents will be excited to use.

Note: Of course this idea of podcasting can be used for any walking tour, not just a museum. So students could create a walking tour of a neighborhood, talking about its history, or construction projects going on, or issues and activism.

Classroom Management Craziness

The mentor teachers put the new teachers in Teacher Boot Camp through a crazy hazing exercise. We had spent some time talking about classroom management. Then they sent all the new teachers out of the room, and called us in one-by-one to tame an unruly classroom.

I was first to go.

I walked in and one of the students had his cellphone playing music, talking lip to me, while another one was sitting on the desk talking loudly across the room to his friends, one had a nerf ball they were playing with, and others were just talking. It was scary. I failed. So I was sent outside of the classroom and asked to come back in to try again.

The same scenario, but this time I took the music-blaring cellphone away, went to the board, and put on a math puzzle, and laid down the challenge to the students. They were hooked. The “no nonsense get to work” approach.

So I passed The Test, and I got to transform myself into one of the unruly students. In each round, as each new teacher passed The Test, there were more and more unruly students and it took the new teachers more and more time and more and more creativity to settle everyone down. Each had a different technique (shutting off the lights, trying to reason with the students, counting aloud). But we unruly children also planned various scenarios for each new teacher to encounter.

My favorite: One girl in the room was in hysterics because her boyfriend cheated on her. There were four other girls comforting her. The boyfriend was in the classroom, taunting her. And then the new teacher walks in. Crying, yelling, the girl’s friends shouting at the boyfriend, and so on. Horrifying.

My second favorite: A new teacher walks up to one of the unruly students named Jose. “Good morning Jose, I’m Ms. [X].” Jose replies, not skipping a beat, “Why do you think my name is Jose? Is it because I’m Puerto Rican?”

Truly classroom management hell.

Videotaping your class

In teacher bootcamp yesterday, we each had to teach a 15 minute section of a 40 minute lesson to our peers. And did I forget to mention that there was a giant, professional videocamera following our every movement?

I haven’t watched the videotape yet. Even though I’m terrified, I think there is so much value in an exercise like this. Because even though it may be hard, and you may not want to see yourself, I know that when I do, I’ll see my teaching in a new light.

Already from my verbal and written critiques of the lesson, I have been told something that I never knew — that no student ever told me in any of the feedback I ask from them. That sometimes (but not all the time) I speak too fast. It wasn’t nervousness or fear of the video camera. I felt like I was conducting the lesson exactly as if I were in my school giving the lesson. (Once I get in front of a class, no matter who or what is observing me, I forget about everything but the math lesson.) So now I know.

I wonder what gems I’ll find from the tape when I watch it… if I can get past the horror of hearing my own recorded voice.