Final Vlog

Week After the Week After the Week After Spring Break

As you might have noticed looking at last week’s blog, there were a lot of students absent on Friday of last week. This has been a common theme throughout the semester. Since we are going to school in the afternoon, a lot of athletics events have overlapped with school hours. I am sure that this is a situation that all teachers have to deal with but our unusual schedule has amplified this problem. It has been difficult to reschedule times to take tests and I have had to deal carefully with some students with who should take the test when. As my internship has drawn to a close I have been doing a lot of grading and have found that this is the part of the job that I like the least. When it comes to things like projects, there is a lot of subjectivity in grading that I find difficult. There is also some subjectivity when it comes to tests. On a map activity, how close to the right country does the student’s answer need to be? Maybe its not a big deal if they place the leader of Iran a little to the north, but not if they get Iraq and Iran confused. On fill-in-the-blank, if a student puts an answer that makes sense but not what I was expecting, should I count it correct? Then I think you get the opposite problem with some multiple choice grading- did they really not know something or is it just that the question approaches the topic differently than we did in class? All of this frustrates me greatly. It only gets worse when students have questions or complaints about their grades. I don’t know that there is an easy solution for this. I guess that when I have my own classroom I will try to create a grading system that makes things clear to the students and tries to keep confusion and ambiguity to a minimum, but I think that this is something that teachers just have to live with to a certain degree.

This week I taught World War II. I used a movie to handle the battles of the war and I found that this went very well. I also used my group sharing frame again and that also worked well for the most part. The one big problem that I found with this unit was that a lot of things took longer than I expected and I went over when I was supposed to be done with WWII by a couple of days. I guess that I will need to continue to work on my timing, but looking back, I see that I am not having as many problems with timing as I was before.

This week’s blog is suppose to be about the week before my last week in school, but I’m going to go ahead and talk about the teaching I did on Monday and Tuesday of this week (my last week) as well since it is all from the same unit and since I want to use my last blog to talk about the entire semester. Anyway, the last thing I taught to the students was the holocaust. This has been by far the most difficult lesson I have had to prepare and teach. In a way, I think I would prefer the driest most confusing economics topic over this. In the movie/play The History Boys, somebody poses the question (rhetorically) how can you teach about the holocaust? Preparing for this lesson, that thought kept running through my head. How much of the horrors did I want to expose my students to? Part of me wanted to keep it very dry and academic to avoid dealing with the deep emotions that this subject can bring up, but I decided to fight this urge. For the lesson, I started off by talking about the magnitude of the loss of life and asked students to compare this to their own communities. I thought about what kind of visuals to use for the lesson; there are plenty of brutal images around that I could have used, but I decided to go with an image from the textbook of a group of men standing on the other side of a barbed wire fence. To me, the look on these men’s faces told the story better than all of the pictures of mangled corpses. I went on to have students read a couple of primary sources from the textbook that gave an idea of the horrors involved and then went on to discuss the causes of the holocaust with them, trying to get them to discuss the causes actively without me really having to lecture. This worked to varying degrees in different classes. I talked about the definition of genocide, carefully dissecting the SOL definition word for word and finally asked the students for other examples- this was good, as we got to talk about current events the students had heard about outside of class. This was a difficult lesson for me and I don’t know how much the students got out of it, but I felt better about myself having gotten through it and I almost seemed to feel closer to the students because of it. I had one class with a bunch of difficult students where I was anticipating some trouble. Sure enough, we got some highly inappropriate comments from some students. My cooperating teacher stepped in as I was preparing to say something about this. I’m still not sure exactly how I would have responded to this student, although I think that the next phase of the lesson would have quelled a lot of these comments. In conclusion, I don’t know how well this lesson worked, but I am happy that I was able to get through this with them. I think just getting through it the first time was a good first step and as time goes on my anxiety about teaching some of these tense subjects will subside and I will improve.

Week After the Week After Spring Break

These are some images I capture off the SmartBoard while using it this week.  I spent this week talking about the rise of dictators after World War I. I had some interesting adventures with technology this week and to give you a little more insight, here are some excerpts from the technology log I have been keeping for my research this semester:
4-15-10
I had a chart in the PowerPoint that I could have had the students fill out using the pen, but I choose to just do it orally. The students were not on-track and I worried that the students would get off track commenting on the writing of the student volunteer rather than focusing on the project.

4-16-10
Today there were several students out of class for field trips and athletic events and I had a test in the next class meeting. I decided that today we would fill out the chart and I would save it to put up on Moodle (the school file-sharing system) so that the students who were not in class could study. I had to run the present in a different mode to make this work but this was not a problem. I did this in both honors classes today. In both, the students writing took away from the discussion of the material- students commenting on the volunteer’s writing, having to explain what to write, spelling, etc. In some cases the writing was barely legible. Still, this was different from a normal class and I believe this difference may have kept the students more engaged. To save the file of the writing I had to go through a few steps on the board, forcing me to delay for a moment and have my back to the class. I saw this as a potential problem but it did not seem to have an adverse effect on the two classes where I did this. Also, during the second class there was a mess-up and half of the writing was lost. This led to some momentary confusion but did not wreck the class. I did not use the writing for the last class of the day as I was fed up with it and I felt that I had what I needed to put online. After having done all of this I did not think that I would be able to post the student writing on-line but when I went back to it later I decided that it was still useable. Using the Smart software I was able to add some clarifying text to the student writing and create a picture file that I loaded into a PowerPoint to go onto the file-sharing system. I was planned to use a PowerPoint based Jeopardy game for review. I had initial concerns but when I tried it out before class it worked fine. However, during the first class the game malfunctioned and I ultimately gave up on using it. I wondered if the problem was due to the SmartBoard being misaligned but I ultimately concluded that it must have become corrupted when I made some changes to the PowerPoint between testing it and using it in the first class. For the second and third classes I adjusted my plans and was able to use the PowerPoint with a different procedure. This reduced the interactive nature of the game, but it was still a useful review tool.

As you can see I had some interesting experiences with technology this week. I think that the bottom line here is that technology can be useful but you have to realize that it can and will malfunction. It can help to think things through beforehand so that you have alternatives when something goes wrong (and if Murphy’s law is correct then this should assure that your technology always works perfectly) but I think that ultimately you have to be able to make adjustments on the fly. You just never know when and how something is going to change or go wrong. As teachers, this should not be a big deal for us because children, like technology, can be unpredictable and often when interacting with both we need to be flexible and find different ways to get things done when necessary.

Week After Spring Break

Remember that stuff about how I should probably be doing more over my Spring Break? That really came back to bite me this week. I have done images of stacks of paper before but this is my very own huge stack of papers/tests to grade. I really worked up to the bell (so to speak) to get all of this done but I did manage to finish all of my grading. We distributed midterms at the end of this week so I had to get everything up to date. I was able to get all of this done but it did take a toll on my stress level. I rushed to finish all of my grading on the last “A” day before midterms were sent out and I definitely think that my teaching suffered as a result of all of this stress.

Also on this day, I handed a lot of the projects and tests I had graded back to students during 1st period. I did this while the students were working in groups on an activity and as soon as I had handed them out, the Great Depression activity time became complain to Mr. Furrow about my grades time. This was not all bad as the students found a couple of genuine errors with my math grading their tests and I was able to fix these mistakes before sending out their grades. Still, this definitely got the students off task and I think the atmosphere of the rest of the class suffered as a result. For third period, I choose not to return any graded items. This has been a difficult balance for me. I have to hand things back sometime and deal with some genuine and some not so genuine issues but I also don’t want class to get off track. This is also especially difficult for me because I don’t like dealing with these sometimes tense situations, but I know that this will be a major part of my duties as a teacher.

On another note, this semester continues to get stranger for my school. On Friday, a bunch of religious protestors picketed outside of the school. The students were told about this in the morning(afternoon) announcements in the days prior to the event so I spent a little bit of class time talking about who these people were and different ways of responding to them. This did take a little precious class time but it was still an interesting and unique opportunity to talk to the students about current civics issues they could relate to so I took advantage of the opportunity.

Spring Break

Not really anything to be proud about but it is what it is.

Not much happening during the spring break for my school. Actually there is less than should probably be going on because there are quite a few things that I should probably be doing. I’m guessing that a lot of teachers struggle with getting things done during the break periods that we are afforded. There is definitely a desire to just relax after a lot of the stressful days that we have, but we have to use this time wisely to keep up.