Tom Kim

A weird week since half of it was spent on the 7th grade camping trip.

MON: Of Mice and Men, Ch. 3 and Alchemy

We began my seventh grade classes by reading the scene where Candy’s dog gets shot. This led to a discussion about the ruthless cruelty of the ranch. I asked students to note which of the survival strategies they brainstormed on Friday were being used by different characters in the novel.

I then read the description of Slim from the previous chapter and suggested that he might be a kind of symbol of some sort.

We then read the scene where Lennie crushes Curley’s hand. We discussed how Curley, who’s a bully, is himself bullied by the buckers in a moment of weakness.

Finally, we read the scene where Candy joins in on George and Lennie’s dream of a ranch. We discussed the concept of the American Dream and the need for hope in such dismal circumstances.

I closed class by introducing the Answers.com Creative Writing challenge. I asked students to look up the definitions of the words for homework and come prepared with story ideas.

The Answers.com contest came to my attention the previous week, by someone who ran across this blog right here and e-mailed me with this opportunity. It came just in the nick of time, too, as I was starting to fret over a vocabulary assignment for the 7th grade. Thanks blogosphere!

Speaking of vocabulary, I began my eighth grade class by reviewing the vocabulary homework assigned over the weekend. I answered questions about the upcoming vocabulary quiz and then moved on to The Alchemist.

We compared Santiago to some of the other characters in the book, namely the crystal merchant and the Englishman. We also had a discussion of what alchemy is and the connection between alchemy and transformation. This led to a fruitful discussion about why alchemy might be central to the book even as it has not really made much of an appearance in the plot thus far.

This was going to be the last class I would have with my eighth graders for the week. I assigned them to finish the vocabulary exercises in their book and forbade them to read ahead in The Alchemist without me.

TUE: Vocab Story

I only had my seventh graders today. We began class discussing the words given for the Answers.com challenge. I sounded like a spokesman for Answers.com, pointing out how looking up the words on their web site leads not only to dictionary definitions but pronunciation sound files, thesaurus and specialized dictionary entries, wikipedia entries, and so on. I forgot to mention Googling a word can take you directly to the Answers.com entry for that word.

I was a little disappointed that a number of my seventh graders did not do the homework. I’ve been falling behind in grading, and so I’ve been loathe to add more to my grading pile. The result, however, has been that homework seems to have diminished in significance to my students.

I gave the students 15 minutes of writing time to get started on the contest. I didn’t want them to have too much homework the night before their camping trip. I also didn’t want them to think too much about Of Mice and Men over the camping trip, either. Having this vocabulary break ended up being a nice transition.

With the remaining minutes of class, I treated my seventh graders to a spontaneous showing of The Potter Puppet Pals.

WED: Camp Victory and Vocab Review

I joined the 7th graders on their camping trip to Camp Victory near Bloomsburg, PA. Camp Victory normally houses programs for children with physical disabilities, but has allowed our school to rent their facilities for our camping trips for several years now. Most of the activities of the camp are run by Quest, an outdoor adventure and recreation program run out of Bloomsburg University. They do an awesome job and started us off on a variety of team-building activities. Later on in the evening the students put together some skits. Umm, let’s just leave it at that.

Meanwhile, I had left the following instructions for my eighth grade class:

1. Play a tutorial (that I burned on DVD) showing how to control other email addresses through Gmail
2. Go over the vocabulary exercises I assigned

THUR: Camp Victory and Vocab Quiz

The second day of camp was jam-packed with rotating activities. Every student got to go on a climbing wall, speed down a zip-line, share at a conflict resolution workshop, and explore Bloomsburg University. Thankfully it didn’t rain until the evening (Quaker) Meeting for Worship; I actually liked listening to the thunder and rain in a relatively silent, reflective meeting.

As for my eighth graders:

1. They took the vocabulary quiz
2. They watched my tutorial on subscribing to feeds using Google Reader — which was apparently too confusing for many

FRI: Heading Home and a Grammar Quiz

Quest created a final team-challenge olympics for our final day. We cleaned our cabins, said our goodbyes, and headed on back for home.

The eighth graders:

1. Took a non-graded grammar assessment that I’m going to use to just take stock of where we need to focus future grammar instruction.
2. Watched my tutorial on creating blogs using learnerblogs.org

Week 3:

All last week I’ve been harassing students to do the technology stuff and do it right. I had to go in to the class wiki and remove all of the students’ last names in order to protect their security and privacy. I also spent the weekend looking over the learning survey results and making seating and small group decisions.

As it turns out, I could rely on a few key indicators to help me decide upon small groups. Only a few students specified that they “liked to take charge and lead the group.” I made sure they were split among different groups. Most students rated themselves moderately between “Let me work on my part of the project” to “It’d be cool if we do this all together” — those students who rated themselves at the extreme were generally grouped together. It was then a matter of eyeballing general personality profiles and skill sets to form the rest of the groups. I tried to achieve general uniformity when it came to group behavior and general diversity when it came to learning styles and skill sets. Of course, I also used my intuition and judgment about students based on classroom observations.

I ended up with four or five 3- to 4-person small groups that I arranged around table clusters in the room. These were going to be my assigned seats for each class.

MON: Tests

I gave out the unit tests for The Water is Wide and A Separate Peace today. One of my colleagues pulled these tests from her archives and submitted them for our review. I was too frazzled to argue and too busy catching up to make tests of my own. I regret that now.

I need to be a bit of a control freak around assessments. Tests are a test of teachers — they reveal characteristics of care, knowledge, fairness, organization, relevance and depth of instruction. Ideally tests should be:

1. As easy to grade as possible
2. Accurate
3. Unambiguous
4. Clear in instruction and design
5. Appropriately broad
6. Appropriately deep
7. Appropriately difficult given classroom expectations

I’m not sure if the tests I gave today meets all these criteria, and that really bothers me.

TUE & WED: 7th and 8th Grade Creative Projects

Creative project presentations. Thankfully, I didn’t see too many generic posters, and I was quite pleased with the level of creativity and care given to some of these projects.

I liked documenting the creative project presentations. I took pictures of my 7th graders and videotaped my 8th graders. Not only did it give me something to decorate the wall outside my classroom with — and something to show the parents — but it also helped jog my memory about each student’s presentation.

Oh, and Tuesday night was Back-to-School Night

I also used the brief respite I had from full-on instruction to update the class wiki to make new pages for our upcoming new units. For each new text I made a modified list of essential questions, a reading schedule, and a blank table similar to the one we took notes on for our summer reading books. This last table was going to be the basis of the active reading homework assignments I was going to assign along with the readings. The X-axis headers specified columns for Plot, Character, Quotes, and Setting. The Y-axis headers specified rows for each night’s reading assignment.

I also created a vocabulary page on the wiki for my 8th grade class.

WED: Introduction to the Alchemist

Assigned seats! Of course, nobody was too thrilled about this new development in the class, but I didn’t really hear any genuine venom. I might very well re-evaluate these seats after each trimester just for variety’s sake.

I had my eighth graders write another journal entry, this time on a true story of pursuing a personal calling. Once again, I left it up to them to interpret the prompt as they saw fit.

As a class we then wrote out the MLA bibliographic citation for our new text, The Alchemist. One of my goals this year is spread out the research instruction more evenly throughout the year.

I didn’t know with this rambunctious group how long it would take to explain the homework assignment, so I made sure I explained it early on. In addition to the assigned reading of The Alchemist, they were to go to the wiki page for The Alchemist and add in notes from the reading. I assigned each corner of every 4-desk table cluster a number. Number 1’s had Plot, 2’s had Character, 3’s had Quotes, and 4’s had Vocabulary. These roles would rotate with each new night’s reading. For one’s role, each student had to go to the appropriate cell on the table on the wiki and add in an appropriate note. You couldn’t repeat content, however, so if you arrived later than other students at the wiki, you would have to look harder to add something new.

I made sure we discussed proper wiki etiquette and accountability — how I was notified of changes and how, therefore, it didn’t make any sense to maliciously change another student’s contribution to the wiki. We discussed how each student needed to place their initials by their contribution and how those students finding quotes needed to cite the page numbers of the quotes. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised how well students understood their homework.

I was therefore able to move on to talk about some of the content of the introduction of the book, which specified what Coelho perceived to be universal obstacles to pursuing one’s Personal Legend.

THUR: Of Mice and Men, Ch. 1 and Santiago at the Beginning

I covered with my seventh graders a lot of the same ground as what I discussed with my eighth graders the day before. Once again, I was pleased how most students clearly understood what the homework assignment entailed.

We then had a good discussion on George and Lennie as characters and on the nature of their friendship. Students were pretty perceptive about what George and Lennie were running from and why Lennie’s personality presented problems for them.

I was also able, with my seventh graders, to go over some background information of Of Mice and Men. We discussed the 1930s, the Great Depression, the migration to California, the Salinas Valley, and — at least with one class — the concept of the American Dream. I also made sure to mention how Steinbeck generally structured the book as a 6-act play; each chapter begins with a description of a fixed setting and all the action within the chapter takes place on that stage.

My eighth grade class started with another journal prompt. I gave them the option to either continue with the prompt from the day before or to respond to a startling picture of a flock of sheep. While they wrote, I expressed my deep admiration that everyone in the class did the homework and did it correctly and rewarded everyone with a Munchkin from Dunkin Donuts.

We then reviewed last night’s reading using everyone’s recent contributions on the wiki as a guide. I then assigned new roles for tonight’s reading.

I then directed everyone’s attention to the specific essential questions for The Alchemist and ran through them quickly. I also made sure to mention the vocabulary quiz that I was going to give them the following week.

FRI: Of Mice and Men, Ch. 2 and Following Your Personal Legend

Following up on my observation on the theatrical nature of Of Mice and Men, I began each seventh grade class with a reading from last night’s homework. I read the narrator prose, and I assigned students to read dialogue. It occurs to me now that it might have served us all well to go over dialogue punctuation conventions; it might have helped students to realize when their lines ended and another student’s had begun. At any rate, we read the scene where Curley first confronts Lennie and George in the bunkhouse.

We discussed the living conditions George and Lennie had to endure. We then moved to discuss the different characters on the ranch, since they all make an appearance in this chapter. We discussed what the mentality and working conditions of the ranch was, and I made an exaggerated analogy to the school from hell. I then asked each class to come up with what strategies they could use to survive under such conditions.

One thing we did not get to discuss much was the contrast between the settings of the first and second chapter. The valley of the first chapter seems idyllic while the ranch of the second chapter seems grueling and depressing.

As for the eighth grade, I began the class by collectively filling out one of the exercise units in their vocabulary books. This led to a discussion of the vocabulary quiz I was to give them next week. Part of their homework for the night was to do another exercise section of the vocabulary book.

As with the seventh grade classes, the eighth grade class was dominated by discussions on the previous night’s reading. I liked how I could use the wiki homework assignment to prompt and guide those discussions. This is especially helpful for The Alchemist since this is a completely new unit that I’ve never taught before. It’s full of soundbite quotes, so I used these to provoke discussion and then later switched to a consideration of some of the essential questions we had discussed prior.

As one might expect, I asked students to continue with the wiki active reading homework assignments.

One of the consequences of having a fun-packed weekend after the first week of school was the lack of time to prepare for the next week. I suffered because of it — causing a lot of confusion because of my lack of planning.

MON: The World of the Map / Designing a Memory

The confusion began right away with my first real lecture. I began class with a provocative journal prompt, write a story on the topic “Living the Map” (7th grade) or “Designing a Memory” (8th grade), however, you choose to interpret that phrase. We shared a little of our stories.

I then emphasized that they were NOT to throw away these half-formed stories, but to keep them and store them for later. They would be the fodder for some of our first blog entries, once we got there. I suggested that students reserve a notebook or a section of their folders to keep these ideas and drafts on file — the way rappers and writers always carry around a little spiral-bound notepad.

My seventh grade classes then discussed how stories were like maps and then how stories were like places. We discussed how stories were a kind of visual guide with symbols and conventions. Students mentioned how maps were often used with a specific agenda or purpose in mind. We then talked about how stories were also immersive experiences that had the ability to transport us to another realm.

I then talked briefly about my experiences with Make Philly over the weekend, how the eye only really processes a few focal areas and how the brain mentally fills in the rest of the picture. I talked about how we understand the world in the same way, that we extrapolate a way of seeing the world based on a few indicators, that this is also the trick that stories use to create a mental map and a virtual world for us. You can begin to see how this was beginning to get confusing for the kids. My seventh graders were intrigued, but didn’t quite know how to process all of this information.

I was even more ambitious with my poor eighth graders. In addition to my spiel about eye movements, I talked about the Rashomon effect and how our memories are not purely empirical recollections but cobbled together from our assumptions, beliefs, and expectations — our mental paradigms. Yes, I used the word paradigms and yes that was the term that broke the camel’s back. Students could follow my anecdote of how people perceived a car accident differently depending on how the question about it was framed, but they really had a hard time with the word “paradigm.”

What was the point of all this rambling? Well, I wanted my students to realize that in fully analyzing a text, they should look at three world/paradigms. I described them as the “World at the Beginning”, “World of the Map/Memory,” and “World at the End.” Also very confusing for students. Might have made more sense to frame it as the background of the book, or the world of the author, then the text itself, then the world of the reader.

Now, despite the fact that I muddled up what I was trying to communicate, I think my intentions were noble, and this is a lecture I might have to return to in the future. Literary analysis tends to be a mysterious process for students. They learn to trust their English teachers to guide them and feed them, but they’re not sure if they can do it on their own. It looks like some some sort of intuitive talent that some people have a knack for and others are simply blind to. I want to show students that there can be a kind of method to the madness, that though, yes, there is a kind of sensitivity that you have to develop, we can also methodically tease out certain areas of scrutiny.

I ended class with some comments on the creative project. I said that students need to try to keep these three worlds in mind when considering what they are to do with their creative project. This is where I really screwed up because: confusion + grade anxiety = confusion squared.

Needless to say, I was constantly approached in the hallway by nervous students who didn’t want to fail because they felt the class was already way over their heads. I did a lot of reassuring this week.

TUE: Themes & The Creative Project

My 8th grade class had a drop block. Only seventh grade today.

I began by playing the song “The Water is Wide” and projecting the lyrics onto the smart board. Students then journaled about what they thought the song was about and why Pat Conroy might have wanted to name his book after this song.

By this time, it was becoming fairly obvious that I’m going to have technical trouble with my Block 3 class all year long. I have Blocks 1 and 4 in my classroom, and I typically just plug in my laptop, put on a keynote slideshow and go. I have to appropriate another teacher’s classroom for my Block 3 class and I’m constantly running into technical issues. The projector needs a new lamp. The speakers don’t work. I can’t log in. I need a password to get out of the screensaver. Etc. Etc. Keeps me on my toes, I suppose.

After discussing the journal prompt, I tried to review the material from the day before in another way. I talked about the three worlds again, this time as “Author,” “Text,” and “You”. Under each world, I specified the sort of things you want to look for in each of these realms.

1. Author: History, Author’s Background, Author’s Interests and intentions
2. Text:
   A. Things to look for in active reading: Characters, Setting, Plot, Quotes
   B. Further analysis: Genre, Motifs, Literary Techniques
3. You: Gut Check, Parallels & Contrast between your world and the world of the author/text

I then told the students that the middle realm — the world of the text — was going to be the major focal point of the class. It’s what they would ultimately be assessed on.

The point of all this examination in all these realms is to tease out a theme, or several themes, from the book. Every year I constantly underestimate how difficult a concept theme is for students. This year was no exception. I said the theme should be able to be stated in a single sentence. I said that the theme is not a vague topic but a specific argument. I winced and said the theme was like the “moral” or lesson of the text. We talked about how one of the themes of Forrest Gump is that “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Students nod as if a light bulb has went off in their heads. Of course, I’ll find later that students still want to think of the theme as an enormous vague concept like “friendship.”

And now…more confusion. I threw the students a curve ball and said that another way to reach the theme in this class was through the use of our essential questions. We then did a class exercise where I gave each small group an essential question to answer about The Water is Wide. Five questions yielded five themes.

I then did a quick song and dance about how the essential questions should begin the creative project process. I did a demonstration using The Water is Wide: the essential question leads to a theme; I then consider how the theme is applicable to the three worlds (author, text, you); I then consider my own creative talents and communicate that theme as it applies to one of those worlds.

Confused? Oh yeah. For some reason it made sense to me when I was making it up. In the past, I just gave the students a menu of options when it came to the creative project — write a story, do a poster, etc. This year, I wanted my students to

1. show me what their creative interests/talents were outside of the classroom
2. apply the unit’s emphasis and essential questions to their summer reading
3. demonstrate a substantive understanding of what they’ve read

In hindsight, I should’ve started with the essential questions and left out the whole three realms of analysis until much much later. It was just too much to chew on at once.

Even the essential questions were confusing for the students — many confused the questions with the theme.

Several students asked to come in and see me individually to give them step-by-step advice to approaching their creative project. Not the most efficient way to teach.

WED: It’s Now the 8th Grade’s Turn to Be Confused

I did yesterday’s spiel with my 8th graders. Hysteria ensues. It was an hour block, and I had other things I wanted to do, though, so I just made some quick reassurances and moved on.

I put aside my slideshows and did a little preparatory review for the unit tests I was going to give my students on Monday. It might have been a little late in coming, but I got there.

As a class we went over to the wiki page on The Water is Wideand A Separate Peace. I had set up a table there for each class. Along the X-axis header, I had labeled columns for Plot, Characters, Setting, and Quotes. Along the Y-axis headers, we labeled rows for the 5 different themes we came up with using our 5 essential questions. As a class, then, we began filling in this table, finding various textual support for each of these themes.

Not only did all the students get to see how to use and modify the wiki, this exercise was a taste of the kind of active reading contribution I want students to engage in later with our next books, Of Mice and Men(7th grade) and The Alchemist (8th grade).

It’s also nice that students could use these wiki pages as reference when studying for the tests.

THUR: Notes on The Water is Wide and A Separate Peace

Heavy use of the smart board today. Using the wiki pages we made yesterday, we identified some of the major characters, plot points, and settings that kept creeping up in our textual support. Naturally, these were the elements of the novel that would be heavily emphasized on the tests. I was able to put on the smart board a rough outline of things to study for and then have a general discussion answering questions and going over key points of each novel.

I then exported the smart board slides as jpeg files, uploaded them to flickr, and posted them on the class blog (after class).

FRI: Weekend Wrapup

Block 4 dropped. Hopefully I covered enough Thursday so that they could study for the test independently.

I started class with a screencast on how to sign up for a gmail account. I argued that they needed a Google account for other things that I wanted to do in the class, and having Gmail was an added bonus, since they could control their other email through Gmail. They didn’t put up too much of a fight when I told them to sign up for Gmail and e-mail me their creative project themes over the weekend.

We then reviewed the smartboard notes from the day before and had a general discussion about the literature. In my hour block, I read a good chunk of the last chapter of The Water is Wide and realized that when Conroy asked “the river be good” to his children in the crossing, he’s talking about the rapidly changing world due to the civil rights movement. That gave me a chance to plug the relevance of technology as a way to anticipate the rapidly rising waters of our own world.

I used the last part of class to clear up any residue confusions about the creative project and announce that they had to present their creative projects with the other people who were doing the same book — which they could look up on the class wiki.

My students had to juggle several things over the weekend:

1. Sign up for a gmail account
2. Complete their creative project
3. Study for their unit test on The Water is Wide/A Separate Peace

All in all, I’d say that class moved along this week, even though I felt I made a hot mess of things at times. I made the creative project overly complex, and I’m pretty sure I could have done more preparation for the test. There were certain concepts that got muddled in my byzantine presentations. Given how I felt I scrambled all week, though, things turned out all right.