Tom Kim

So I already mentioned the great time I had at Make Philly. I was impressed with the Rube Goldberg challenge they came up with, which was both fun and impressive. It was described as a kind of exquisite corpse, where each team contributed one part of the final machine that was compatible with its adjacent parts. Six teams were each given wooden panels. One corner of the panel had a written “input” instruction, indicating how an object would be received by their part, and an “output” instruction, indicating how they were to then send something to the next part. The team I was in was at the head, so we didn’t have an input, but our output instruction indicated that we were to “throw” something to the next team. So we decided to launch a billiard ball down a ramp and up a little jump into the next panel.

All in all, it worked beautifully, and it was poetic how we started with a billiard ball and ended with a bowling ball. I had to leave before all the tweaks got completely worked out, but here’s a video of the final working run:

There are writing and visual art versions of the exquisite corpse game — something possibly to keep in mind.

Reflect on your teaching this past year. Please include the goals you set for yourself in your last reflection or evaluation and comment on how you made measurable progress towards meeting each goal.

Last year I focused my goals in three areas:

• Becoming more organized and efficient in assessing, tracking, and following through on student performance.
  • I followed through on developing a personal database to support my personal habits of grading and planning — though not without technical hiccups. Nevertheless, I believe I became more prompt in generating grade reports and follow-up for students.
• Incorporating technology in the classrooom, specifically through blogging.
  • My ambitious plans for 7th grade blogging fell by the wayside as I struggled to juggle side issues of technical instruction with the curricular schedule. Nevertheless, the 8th grade did manage to use blogs meaningfully as a proxy for literature circles in their Book Review unit. Lots of valuable lessons learned.
• Strengthen my extracurricular obligations: the Literary magazine and the Robotics Club
  • I experimented with a middle school blog for the literary magazine. Once again, there were many valuable lessons learned — including a spam attack that forced the deletion of the site.
  • The Robotics Club did take on a more formal, rigorous structure and followed a set curriculum. What we did not do that I wished we had is visit competitions and proactively plan to move the club to be more ready to engage such activities.
  • I also oversaw the Computer Academy, which was a more free-form, exploratory extracurricular activity that covered a variety of technological topics.

Please outline your goals for the 2007-2008 year.

How do you see your own professional development goals intersecting with the institutional goals of Quakerism, diversity, and technology?

Blogging, in particular, addresses all three dimensions:

• it is a technological medium for communication and community
• it provides an alternate means of expression and instruction than is normally available in the classroom
• it can facilitate ecological stewardship (paperless office), reflective practice, and consensual collaboration

On my other blog I’ve posted some notes on Everyday Theology, which outlines not only a well-reasoned religious view of culture, but a general critical literacy view. Lots of overlap with what I aspire to teach.