Thirty-Eight Days to Sweet Blessed Freedom
Thirty-seven if you add in the fact that I'll be missing Friday to attend Mississippi College's Acceptance Day. Of course, I'll have to create substitute lesson plans, which actually means more work for me.
The crazy thing is that now I actually feel as if I can teach the things I truly feel are important. I've already been observed three times, so they probably won't come back again.
So today I taught my eleventh grade students the importance of thinking. They had to sit and think for three minutes before they were allowed to write down a sentence. By the end of the class they had written down nine sentences. Some of the attempts were bland, others were wonderful. I could overhear some of the students grumbling about the pointlessness of the assignment. At the end of the lesson, I wrote the following on the board:
"If thinking is considered a waste of time, I fear for the future of our society."
No one grumbled after reading that, I assure you.
In other education news, my eleventh graders had to write a short story that they felt captured the themes of their generation, much as Fitzgerald zeroed in on the issues of his time. I glanced through them today, and many of them are quite good. I was impressed. I'll bring some home and quote a little out of them tomorrow.
My tenth graders, on the other hand, seem to have given up entirely. They had over eight days to prepare a FIVE-MINUTE presentation that counts as a test grade. That means they could have planned 37.5 seconds of the presentation a day and been fine. What happened instead involved lots of inane laughing.
They had to offer a summary of a text, a brief analysis, and an activity that related the text to the class. The summaries were snippets culled from the book, the analyses were rehashed summaries, and the activities were wholeheartedly pathetic. One group presented Frost's "Mending Wall". Their activity looked like this.
1. Have you ever climbed a wall?
2. Have you ever built a wall?
3. Is it tough to go through a wall?
4. Do you like walls?
I swear, when I read it, I would have gone the way of the Shawshank Redemption grocery bagger if a noose and rafter had been nearby. I wonder if I could carve my initials in cinder block if I tried hard enough.
The crazy thing is that now I actually feel as if I can teach the things I truly feel are important. I've already been observed three times, so they probably won't come back again.
So today I taught my eleventh grade students the importance of thinking. They had to sit and think for three minutes before they were allowed to write down a sentence. By the end of the class they had written down nine sentences. Some of the attempts were bland, others were wonderful. I could overhear some of the students grumbling about the pointlessness of the assignment. At the end of the lesson, I wrote the following on the board:
"If thinking is considered a waste of time, I fear for the future of our society."
No one grumbled after reading that, I assure you.
In other education news, my eleventh graders had to write a short story that they felt captured the themes of their generation, much as Fitzgerald zeroed in on the issues of his time. I glanced through them today, and many of them are quite good. I was impressed. I'll bring some home and quote a little out of them tomorrow.
My tenth graders, on the other hand, seem to have given up entirely. They had over eight days to prepare a FIVE-MINUTE presentation that counts as a test grade. That means they could have planned 37.5 seconds of the presentation a day and been fine. What happened instead involved lots of inane laughing.
They had to offer a summary of a text, a brief analysis, and an activity that related the text to the class. The summaries were snippets culled from the book, the analyses were rehashed summaries, and the activities were wholeheartedly pathetic. One group presented Frost's "Mending Wall". Their activity looked like this.
1. Have you ever climbed a wall?
2. Have you ever built a wall?
3. Is it tough to go through a wall?
4. Do you like walls?
I swear, when I read it, I would have gone the way of the Shawshank Redemption grocery bagger if a noose and rafter had been nearby. I wonder if I could carve my initials in cinder block if I tried hard enough.
posted by Yorick at 7:46 PM
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