People who dismiss Middle School kids don't spend much time with Middle School kids!

I love my job!

We are in the middle of the section on the Constitution and I am in hog heaven. We have spent the week looking at the Bill of Rights and the last couple of days on a Supreme Court decision from the 80s. The discussions yesterday and today are why I teach. They are engaged--they have been arguing the case in other classes as well! They are well versed on the Fourth Amendment and are asking great questions...

• Student's Rights versus 'School Environment'
• What happens when you search for one thing and find something worse?
• When should parents be notified when  a student is suspected of violating a school policy? A crime?
• Should students expect to have any privacy while at school?
• Are teachers agents of the parents or agents of the states?

One of the beauties of these discussions is at this age is they still live in a state of idealism. What is right is what is fair and they don't tend to see a lot of 'gray'. I get to play devil's advocate and they get really frustrated with me when I change sides on a dime.

To invoke Thanksgiving--they are gobbling up the debate. They see how complicated it is to protect our rights and are up for the challenge! The want to understand and are more than capable of coming up with their own opinions.

Dismiss them at your own peril.

When people wax on about the state of education and young people, I smile. They don't see what I see. Wax on...just know that we are fine. There are issues to be sure, but there are always issues to deal with. How we deal with them is the better discussion. We look back nostalgically on our youth and forget something:

They aren't like us but, hell, we weren't like us either.

Ok, watch this video at your own risk. I can't get it out of my brain.

I am not speaking ill of the work "Mr. Beats" does. Teaching is hard enough without teachers baggin' on each other. He uses the tools he has and goes above and beyond what most teachers do and so he is a rock star in my book.

If you go to Mr. Beat's channel, you will find a low tech Crash Course sort of presentation. The information is fine but its not as flashy as what John Green puts out. I was showing a documentary on Nicodemus to my 7th Grade History students and came across Mr. Beats channel. I gotta give it to him that he puts himself out there for his students and there is a sense of humor in the videos. We had a few minutes and so I pulled up the above video for Taft.

The video was a hit.

The original song is a hoot. The kids were singing, "Taft, Taft, Taft, ... Taft, Taft, Taft..." on their way out and learned he was the only president to be on the Supreme Court as well as a frienemy of Teddy Roosevelt. (Also that he got stuck in a bathtub but we won't speak of that. Us, husky guys gotta stick together!)

It was icing on a great day of teaching. We studied New Jersey versus TLO in American History and had some of the best discussions I have this year in all three classes.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

The Gettysburg Address will just have to wait!!!!

This Day in History is killing me!

We are spending this week talking about the Bill of Rights in class. Anyone who knows me knows that is one of my favorite weeks as a teacher. We have wrestled with the Constitution and the ratifying conventions, which is fun. But...THE BILL OF RIGHTS!!!

The dilemma this year is that today is the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address. 150 years. A century and a half. I had a lesson plan worked out and was going to take a daytrip to the address from the Bill of Rights. And then the kids started asking question about search and seizure and speedy trial and why Kansas doesn't have Grand Juries and I realized that Lincoln was going to wait. I always spend a few days with the Address so it will get its day in the sun.

The videos above are similar to ones I'm using in class this week. They are put together by the Annenberg folks and the data is good and the people they are interviewing are top drawer. The part I am digging, however, are the graphics and videos they are using in the background. They have found every bad educational video we were forced to sit through and used them in a way that works. They are so unintentionally bad that they are perfect for the videos.

I like the one I'm using better than these but it didn't have a YouTube video. The one I'm using is The Story of the Bill of Rights. It has to be created by the same people who made Let Freedom Swing, which offers the thesis that Jazz and democracy share improvisation as a key attribute. I will use it in the spring as we go deeper in what it means to be a citizen.

BTW-Ken Burns has a new documentary on the Gettysburg Address and how it is used in a school in Vermont. One of the offshoots of the movie is Learn the Address. I love this idea! On the anniversary of the Address, I will leave you with one this 'mashup' from that website.

Doing our job by not doing our job...

 

A teacher friend whom I look up to posted are article on coaching teachers (Chad's Blog--Learning is Messy). In that post, he look at what one researcher states are the needs of adult learners. That list is posted below but with a little Chad-twist...he's replaced 'adult' with 'student'.

 

• Students want to be the origin of their learning and want control over the what, who, how, why, and where of their learning. 
• Students will commit to learning when they believe the objectives are realistic and important for their personal and professional needs. 
• Students need to see that what they are learning is applicable to their day to day activities and problems.
• Students  need to see very clearly the relevance of what they’re being asked to learn. 
• Students need to have some say in what they’re doing.
• Students  need direct, concrete ways to apply what they have learned to their work.
• Students (like adults)  need to feel emotionally safe in order to be able to learn.

His argument is that while all of those are needs of adults, how are student's needs any different?

I agree.

Its their education. Our job is as a cheerleader and coach and placeholder for them as they figure out how to be their own learners. When we take over for them (either as a parent or teacher) we deny them a chance to guide themselves into maturity. When we as teachers look for the lowest common denominator as the standard to teach toward, we inadvertently say to our charges that mediocrity is the same thing as success.  My concern is that our fear that students experience anything other than success places them in a situation that we impair their ultimate ability to be successful.

Thought experiment: How many of us as adults look back at the events in our lives which made us stronger, smarter, more mature and better people and see events in which we were only marginally involved? We were sitting in a chair listening passively and shazookum... it happened. The magic eight ball says 'the odds are low'.

I won't speak for anyone else but I've had to work hard to be a better student, better teacher, better dad and husband, ... insert whatever role you'd like there. I've been forced to confront ideas and realities I thought were beyond my comprehension; to do things I was sure were beyond my abilities. Sometimes, in response to those challenges, I succeeded and learned I was more than I thought I was. Often I didn't succeed and I learned that taking that leap didn't kill me. Mistakes are the best lesson plans. There is a great line from a song,

Each game of chess means there's one less/
Variation left to be played
Each day got through means one or two/
Less mistakes remain to be made." 

I didn't do it alone; supportive adults abounded in my life. They challenged and encouraged and pissed me off on more than one occasion--they pushed me to learning at more than just a baby step pace. They expected more out of me than I did myself until I was ready to.

Why do we deny that to our students?

Dante and teacher conferences...

I'm sitting here in parent teacher conferences. Don't be jealous! I have two days of these puppies...again, don't hate!

I actually like them for the most part. Education is a partnership and the best ones come from all three parties (student-parent-teacher) playing well in the sandbox. Most of the parents wants what's best for their kids. So do teachers. If that is the common denominator, then even the most difficult conference is a 'good conference".

The conferences where teacher, parent or student have axes to grind--Dante couldn't envision a ring of Hell for those.  Those are the conferences which give conferences a bad name.  Those are the exceptions, not the rule and so should be treated as such.

Well, its my tun to talk ....

The Declaration videos I love...

Earlier today, I told the kids about all the great video choices for this moment history. More than I can show in class. They asked for them all in one place...here they are. The podium points I promised are down below. Enjoy!

Declaration of Independence videos I like:

 

A music video from Soomo Publishing

 

The complete Declaration as interpreted by 90s/00s actors

 

http://youtu.be/ds4dv4IS0PM

This is from the musical 1776. A singing and dancing TJ, Adams and Franklin. What's not to love?

 

The best for last. The moment between when Georgia votes and the public reading ... they say so much without a word being spoken. Brilliant.

 

Podium Point post from a previous epoch

Podium Point #1--Whoa, not  so fast...
Podium Point #2--Stay offa First, will ya...
Podium Point #3--Podium Point #3: "Twy vewy vewy hahd not to destwoy uth." ...
Podium Point #4--"...and I believed him because he was a basketball fan." ...
Podium Point #5--" What happened last year?"...

Is that a woman in the boat?

Washington Crossing the Delaware

  Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)

As we work through the Revolutionary War, my students and I wrestle with this painting: Washington Crossing the Deleware by Emauel Leutze. This painting is roughly twelve feet by twenty one feet and images of it do not do it justice. We wrestle with the painting as a whole, but mostly with the figures in the boat. With no background knowledge of the Deleware River, the Battle of Trenton, fashion of the 18th Century, and art composition, they notice things:

• Is that a women in the boat? Would she really have been there?
• Why is Washington standing? Isn't that dangerous?
• Why are they all dressed differently. Why are some in uniforms and other not? What's the deal with free black man and the guy with beret. Would they have really been in the boat?
• Who is the guy behind Washington?

When students are engaged, they are a force to be recconned with. All three classes had great questions and offered impressive guesses as to Leutze's choices in this retelling of the crossing. At the end of this exercise we read an except (below) from Fischer's Washington Crossing. They are always surprised at how much of the painting the understood. They don't know how to articulate what they see, but they notice none the less.

The painting is familiar to us in a general way, but when we look at it again its details take us by surprise. Washington's small boat is crowded with thirteen men. Their dress tells us that they are soliders from many parts of America, and each of them has a story revealed by a few strokes of the artist's brush. One man wears the short tarpaulin jacket of a New England seaman; we look again and discover that he is of African descent. Another is a recent Scottish immigrant, still wearing the Balmoral bonnet. A third is a an androgynous figure in a loose red shirt, maybe a woman in man's clothing, pulling at the oar.

At the bow and stern of the boat are hard-faced western riflemen in hunting shirts and deerskin leggings. Huddled between the thwarts are farmers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in blanket coats and broad-brimmed hats. One carries a countryman's double barrel shotgun. The other looks very ill, and his head is swathed in a bandage. A soldier beside them is in full uniform, a rarity in this army; he wears the blue coat and red facings of Haslet's Deleware Regiment. Another figure wears a boat cloak and an oiled hat that a prosperous Balitmore merchant might have used on a West India Voyage; his sleeve reveals the facings of Smallwood's silk-stocking Maryland Regiment. Hiden behind them is mysterious thirteenth man. Only his weapon is visible; one wonders who he might have been.

The dominant figures in the painting are two gentlement of Virginia who stand tall above the rest. One of them is Lieutenant James Monroe, holding a big American flag upright against the storm. The other is Washington in his Continental uniform of buff and blue. He holds a brass telescope and wears a heavy saber, symbolic of a stateman's vision and a soldier's strength. The artist invites us to see each of these soldiers as an idividual, but he also reminds us that they are all in the same boat, working desparately against wind and current. He has given them a common sense of mission, and in the stormy sky above them he has painted a bright prophetic star, shining through a veil of a cloud.

-taken from the introduction of Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

 

 

I love my my job.