Fun & Exciting Stuff

This is just amazing. 438 students are freshmen this year.

# Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%.
# Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%.
# Year that an incoming Amherst College class first created a Facebook group so that they could socialize and otherwise get to know each other prior to arriving on campus: 2006.
# By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.
# Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.
# Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.
# Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93.

And I am running dittos and using a textbook. Sheesh. I have never felt like an old lady driving a 1970 Pinto in the slow lane of the 6 lane super highway. Teaching is passing us by.

It is something that has to smack some of our kids in the face. I don’t know that they realize how good they have it. Maybe they do, but the vast majority of them have no idea what the real world is like.

As good jobs become harder to find, bad jobs have become much easier to get. In 1979, 41 percent of workers who didn’t finish high school held “bad jobs,” those with no health insurance or pension plans and paid less than $16.50 an hour in inflation-adjusted wages. By 2005, that number had gown to 61 percent, Schmitt found.David Meza of Beaverton, Ore., is struggling to escape that trend. Meza, 47, worked 14 years assembling heavy-duty trucks for the Freightliner truck company. But when most of the production operations were moved to Mexico, he was laid off in March 2007.

An 11th-grade dropout who taught himself to read and write, Meza never earned his General Equivalency Diploma because he was making $21.50 an hour without it. He didn’t realize his mistake until he started looking for a new job.

“I had a lot of experience. I ran a forklift, worked at canneries in Alaska, been a truck driver, but none of that matters unless I’ve got a GED. So I’m pushing myself as hard as I’ve ever done in my life to get it,” he said.

This is a great idea for students. We are always saying we want to make dry boring history interesting, illustrating the ideas of communism and why the art director used this type of advertisement would be an interesting way to start a lesson. I knew a teacher who asked kids to make a CD case (I suppose now it would be an iPod play list) of Gandhi’s favorite music as a project. You had to demonstrate why the song would be one of his songs. It was just a different way of getting to the content.

I think this post is very important to educators.

“Why do we have to write an essay?”

Ans: Well, these types of essays will be on the final exam, so these are preparation of a sort for the Regents exam.

Will you be asked to recite the cultural changes of the 1920’s in some future job interview? Maybe if it is for a job as “flag pole sitter” down at the “Chaplin & Capone’s Restaurant – Where silence is our business!” Probably not.

I don’t know that there is a correct answer to that question. I think there is a certain level of correctness, for lack of a better word, to my answer. In the immediate future, the final exam carries a certain weight. I can’t change the situation in 3 months, so they are going to have to answer an essay like that.

But I have been having an ongoing conversation with another teacher about how in “teacher” – as we know it will be obsolete within our lifetimes. From the perspective of a student, if, and that is a big “if” knowing some of the students I know, I wanted to learn about the US Civil War, where would I go for information? Would I cycle back through all the worksheets Mr. Potter handed out to me? Go talk to my history teacher? Or would I go here, here, here, here, or here. And those are just web pages. What about blogs, wikis, Twitter-ing a historical expert, etc. etc. And this is a five second Google search + Wikipedia. I could find a good overall gist of the situation pretty quickly.

I go into used book stores when I have time + cash. I think it is a national requirement that they have a copy of American Caesar. My thinking is always that I should buy it. It is something that I am interested in, but I don’t need to be an expert on it and have the background knowledge and be able to connect to the greater concept of WWII. But then one night I came home and did this. More information than I could possibly want. Most of it reliable, but enough that is that I can get a good overall picture of it.

I don’t know that you could become an engineer or a doctor based off of reading Wikipedia, but if you are looking for general information/content, then you could definitely use sources like those.

The skill of writing/communicating obviously has a level of importance. The ability to organize information has another level of importance. But content knowledge has been changing.

Our role as teacher has to adapt to today’s knowledge-level. I don’t know what that is yet, but it is getting late.

I am on a committee that deals with 21st Century learning skills. We have a plan in which the students are going to visit other local schools that have advanced farther than us down the 21st century learning skills path. We have (finally) come to the conclusion that we can only go to 3 local schools. The main problem at this juncture is transportation. We are coming to the end of the school year and the $ is not there for us to get 2 buses and go all over the county.

Now, I am thinking that since we are teaching 21CLS, there has to be a technological way to overcome this obstacle. Maybe a face-to-face with admin./teachers/students from other schools is the”old way” of doing things and since we are trying to practice what we preach, there might be a better way to do it. I brought up the dreaded Facebook/MySpace combo as a way to overcome this, but it was immediately shot down. YouTube is blocked by BESS. TeacherTube is blocked by BESS. Most wikis are blocked by BESS. Most blogs are blocked by BESS. Yes, we can unblock the filter, but we are trying to teach 21CLS, using 20th Century technology.

And we aren’t even on to some of the more complicated issues yet.

That was the comment from one of my students yesterday at the end of the period. She wanted to spend the last minute of my period talking to her.

I can’t help but feel sorry for the student going GED. I am glad you are getting an equivalent diploma, but where are you going next? It is obvious you have differences with teachers if you feel the need for a GED program. There are probably people out there who went GED because it was better for them as a whole, maybe they didn’t have problems with teachers. In any event, college isn’t in your future. What is your plan?
By doing this, you are putting yourself down a peg and making it more challenging for your future. Yes, in the short term, you have gotten away from school, but 5 years from now, high school won’t mean a whit.

What is really bugging me is the cool factor that is associated with the GED. The others see it and the people who are there and it is seen as a very cool thing to do. “If my parents would let me, I’d go get my GED.” Thank the heavens they aren’t.

Extra-curriculars have taken up a lot of my recent time. The planning and execution of the grand American tradition of homecoming has taken up the last few weeks of my time. Next week will be when we put all of our plans into action. One component of that is to build a “float”. Now you may have seen the Macy’s floats at Thanksgiving or the Rose Bowl parade on New Year’s Day. This is similar to that in that there is movement to the float. We obviously don’t have the big budgets that they do, so we are limited in what we can use for our supplies. Cardboard has been our main component (Thank you ALPCO recycling) and we have spent the last two Saturdays working on a Wizard of Oz themed float. And for a group that has little skill in creating something like this, we haven’t done have bad. We aren’t going to come in first, but we probably aren’t going to come in last.

Which brings me to my title. The kids wanted to play Wizard of Oz music as we are marching. So the question comes up, “Does anyone have a battery-powered CD player?” Now,  it took me a minute, but I finally figured out what they were asking for. They wanted what I call a regular CD player. A big radio, with a CD player and some speakers. They all had iPod docks. Feeling every bit of my years, said “Why yes, I have 3 of them, at least.”

When did I get so old.

Number 1 kabillion on the list of unfortunate side effects of the war in Iraq: The President has the ability to start a war. As part of our Constitution unit we review the powers of the different branches and I have a little review checklist as an end of the day activity to refresh their memories. I would say 3/4 of them choose the President as the one who “starts a war”. Congress has to give their approval.

Here.

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

“It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

My favorite part.

The two friends said they didn’t take the action looking for publicity, but rather to show leadership in combating what they say is frequent bullying in schools.

Continuing to confirm my theory on Canadians.