Sharon is filling in here at school for the final time, and since next to Kristie she is my most loyal reader, she advised me that I better get with it and get some new entries posted.
Well, here you go Sharon. Enjoy these before heading out on your trip to the southeast.
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My Lit and Language 11 class and I have a love, hate relationship. Yesterday, they absolutely blew me away by wanting to read Act one of The Crucible. Kids volunteered to read, and it was great.
Today, many complained about having too much work (I love that), so I gave them time to finish their work from yesterday. Most worked very well. Then I notice two morons sitting in back who tend to do nothing (they even took it upon themselves to leave 10 minutes early one day while I was in the computer lab getting the grade printouts). I figure, sink or swim. I’m done yelling at you.
So I let them waste the hour. They will get zeroes on their assignments because they are due at the end of the hour, and they have done nothing.
I have been busy helping kids in the room and the computer lab. When I came in to my room, I noticed jackass number one in back had his cell phone out. My rule is if you have your cell phone out and use it, it is an automatic quiz for the entire class on whatever I happen to be thinking about. So we took a quick five question quiz on the solar system. I was only going to make it five questions, but as we got to question five, I noticed jack ass #2, who was sitting right next to jack ass #1, had her cell phone out and was texting. I mean how stupid do you have to be?
So I extended the quiz by another five points. What are these kids going to do out in the real world? I have eight words for them, “Welcome to McDonalds. May I take your order?”
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A colleague here is keeping me abreast of his frustrations with some of his students. Well, one in particular. Apparently, she asked to use the bathroom and spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time in there, so he had someone check. Apparently, she was in there texting another girl back in the class! Why you would text them from the bathroom when you could just go back to class and talk to them is beyond me.
Incidents like this make me long for the days when I used to fret about kids passing notes back and forth. How much things have changed in a decade. No students had cell phones. Ipods were still in Steve Jobs’ laboratories. What will the landscape look like in another decade.
*****
I’ve decided I’ve been a little too harsh on my Lit and Language 11 class. Yes, they get off track easily and wear me out. But, for the most part, they aren’t bad kids. They might not be motivated to work really hard or even stay on task, but we make the most of it.
One thing that has worked best with them is just visiting them while they work. Yesterday, for example, I assigned a sequence chart for them to apply to the first act of The Crucible. As they worked on it in groups, I walked around charting their progress. My room happens to be particularly bad for static electricity, so I walked over to one of my former football players who was goofing off a bit, dragging my feet along the carpet all the way to get a good charge worked up. Then I gently tapped his ear – ZAP. He almost shot out of his chair.
“Stay on task, or I’ll zap you again!” I joked.
That worked better than me yelling at them ever could. So periodically I had to walk around and zap anyone not on task. Again, this worked amazingly. “See, you sparked that means you’re a witch. Time for the gallows,” I said trying to connect it to the foolish tests the citizens of Salem thought they could conduct to determine who was a witch and who was not.
Soon I had a dozen kids trying to shock each other. It would have made for a perfect science experiment But I had them laughing while finishing their work. With this class, that’s not always easily done.
Then while they were working on an assignment, I took my cell phone out of my pocket (we were having a new water heater installed, so I had it just in case something went wrong) and planted it on a student’s desk. My class rules state if I see A cell phone – it doesn’t have to belong to a student – there is an automatic quiz. When the student turned around and saw the cell phone sitting on his book he said, “What the?”
Those around him freaked out since a quiz was looming. “This isn’t mine, he said as he opened it up to see whose it was. When he saw my wife’s face on the screen, my prank was up.
“Quiz time,” I announced to a classful of groans and complaints.
“Hey, the rule says ‘if I see any cell phone. It could be mine or anyone’s.”
But I let them off the hook. They were relieved.
It was nice to have a little fun with this class instead of always beating my head against a wall trying ot keep them on track.
After school one of my Lit and Language 11 students, who was also a former football player of mine, stopped in right before parent-teacher conferences started. We spent fifteen minutes talking about the upcoming draft and the top college prospects. He was interested and open, voicing his opinion and arguing with me. If only he’d be like that in class more and not so lazy. But I wasn’t so different from him when I was junior. You just have to enjoy the opportunities to see them interesting and open about something – even if it isn’t the Salem witch trials.
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On the plus side, this freshman composition class of mine is something else. I have most of them enjoying what they write. I don’t know how I did it, but I just have to keep it going. Maybe it’s because I make them laugh with my own stories or with my trials and errors as a student and writer. Whatever it is, they are hard workers.
We are writing a personal narrative on a rite of passage. We have discussed our own rites of passage. We have read examples of them (one of my favorite is called “A Girl Needs to Know How to Defend Herself”). To top things off, I showed the film The Sandlot which illustrates many rites of passage. The freshmen loved it. I mean they never said a word. I don’t know how long it has been without at least someone offering a snide comment or poking fun at some aspect of the film. It was to the point that I was doubting students’ ability to pay attention long enough to get through a movie anymore. Since this week is short because of conferences, I was trying to decide what to do with them since it’s not much time to develop a fully essay. While I was thinking about this, one student came in and asked if all rites of passage had to be positive. That got me thinking about another great rite of passage film, Stand By Me, which is a perfect contrast to The Sandlot.
I planned on showing it on Monday, but I noticed that the film is rated R. That means getting parent permissions slips. Today, I walked into class and asked for the slips. Then I was presented with a true first in my career: every student handed in their permission slip. I couldn’t believe it. I always thought the freshmen struggled to adjust to high school and all the work here compared to the middle school work load.
Now I’m starting to question that. Could it be that they do things right at the middle school and we mess them up here? So far this class is amazing me.
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I spent just about my entire Sunday reading essays from my College Comp class. They were quite good. The topic was to write about an important event or object from their lives. I was treated narratives on the death of a beloved family dog, sunfishing with one student’s grandfather, a sister attempting to get revenge on her brother by soaking him with a garden hose and then feeling remorse at the last second, another sister realizing that she is now culpable for what goes wrong in the house now that her two older brothers are gone and they cannot lie their way out of a predicament anymore, another student wrote about the first time he cried at a funeral. They were all good reading.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot of work ahead of them, though. That was one reason the reading took so long. I really sank my teeth into the essays. In some cases, I wrote more on the essays than the students did themselves. I try to do this early, so they can learn what I’m looking for in their writing – depth, strong images, key details, dialogue and reflection, no tacked on introductions or conclusions, analysis . . .
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