We had our class blog discussions today and I think they went pretty well. We definitely got into some heated conversations (check out some of the posts under "Girls Only"). Overall the response from the kids was overwhelmingly positive, and there was actually an audible groan when the bell rang after first block--students were asking me if we could come back to the discussions next time.
I think that for the most part the students really did engage the issues that I wanted them to think about and discuss. There are a lot of pretty insightful comments in there; I'm excited to wade through them all systematically.
I want to give my classes a survey about the discussion next time to get a sense of how productive they thought it was. I also want to ask them if they felt that they were truly anonymous while posting or if they felt that their classmates knew who they were. I think I'll also ask them how many of the other students' pseudonyms they were able to figure out. Previously on this blog we discussed whether students were really anonymous--we wondered if they could figure out who their classmates were even with the use of pseudonyms. I think they can in some cases, but overall I think they really are anonymous. Obviously they can figure out some of their friends' pseudonyms, but at several points I heard students saying "Who is that?" or "Who wrote that?" One student in particular mentioned to me as she left that she thought other students felt more comfortable being controversial and saying what they really believed because "no one knows who they are."
I am still convinced that the format itself is an advantage when trying to get students to address controversial or difficult issues. The feeling of anonymity combined with the reduced pressure (students don't have to raise a hand and speak in front of a group) make for a better environment for these kinds of conversations.
If you'd like to check it out for yourself, there are two different discussions, block 1 and block 2.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Class Blog Discussion
I posted the prompts for my class blog discussion, which will be happening in early October. If you see anything that might need to be changed or can think of any additional questions, feel free to offer suggestions.
I'm sticking with the plan we came up with at our last meeting, which is to have my students write prompts for the teachers at our conference to respond to. I think I'll have them write questions about the reality show Kid Nation. It relates to Lord of the Flies, and is pretty controversial. I'm sure we'll think of a couple other relevant topics as well. I'll have the blog set up with anonymous comments enabled so there will be no need to sign in or get a blogger account. That way anyone who comes to learn about classroom blogging should be online and part of an active discussion within five minutes of coming into the room.
I'm sticking with the plan we came up with at our last meeting, which is to have my students write prompts for the teachers at our conference to respond to. I think I'll have them write questions about the reality show Kid Nation. It relates to Lord of the Flies, and is pretty controversial. I'm sure we'll think of a couple other relevant topics as well. I'll have the blog set up with anonymous comments enabled so there will be no need to sign in or get a blogger account. That way anyone who comes to learn about classroom blogging should be online and part of an active discussion within five minutes of coming into the room.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Some Old Guy with a Blog
You know, there's nothing like working with 14-17 year-olds all the time to make a guy feel old. To be honest I thought I was doing pretty well in this category. The gray is just barely starting to show, my hairline is holding tough, no premature wrinkles or anything to complain about. But not just that, I feel pretty young, too. I still listen to the latest music, I'm not stuck in the eighties or anything. I keep up with pop culture and *used* to think of myself as at least reasonably cool.
But that was yesterday--in the days of my youth. Now I'm just some old guy with a blog.
You see, I teach in a "cottage" as I've mentioned before, which is actually a double-wide trailer containing two classrooms which are connected by a closet. In that closet I have been storing my TV because I've been using some multimedia lately. Well, I was pushing my TV into the closet for safe keeping when I overhead a conversation in the room next door. It was obvious immediately that my trailer-mate was gone and two girls were in his room talking.
"Hey, I wonder what's in the closet." I heard one of them ask.
"Go see," responded the other, with an excitedly curious tone.
The next second the door opened and I nodded hello to the girl who stood there and looked at me like I was the last thing in the world she had expected to see. She didn't say a thing, turned around and the door swung shut behind her.
"What's in there?" I heard the other voice ask through the door.
"Some old guy with a TV."
I promise I'll post my class blog prompts soon, but I thought this was an anecdote worth sharing :-)
But that was yesterday--in the days of my youth. Now I'm just some old guy with a blog.
You see, I teach in a "cottage" as I've mentioned before, which is actually a double-wide trailer containing two classrooms which are connected by a closet. In that closet I have been storing my TV because I've been using some multimedia lately. Well, I was pushing my TV into the closet for safe keeping when I overhead a conversation in the room next door. It was obvious immediately that my trailer-mate was gone and two girls were in his room talking.
"Hey, I wonder what's in the closet." I heard one of them ask.
"Go see," responded the other, with an excitedly curious tone.
The next second the door opened and I nodded hello to the girl who stood there and looked at me like I was the last thing in the world she had expected to see. She didn't say a thing, turned around and the door swung shut behind her.
"What's in there?" I heard the other voice ask through the door.
"Some old guy with a TV."
I promise I'll post my class blog prompts soon, but I thought this was an anecdote worth sharing :-)
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Back to Work
School is back in full swing and it's time to get back to my research project. I have written a few questions for my class blog discussion, which I want to center around the book we are reading, Lord of the Flies. I'm hoping to get that new blog up and posted sooon with the questions I have already written.
From my inquiry group I am hoping to get some feedback about the questions I have already written, and hopefully generate some ideas for additional questions. I think that it's essential for this first discussion to have good topics and questions to discuss.
The next step will be to have the students write and post their own prompts for a second discussion, this one centering around Macbeth. For the final blog discussion of the semester I will have my sophomores write prompts for my ninth graders to respond to. I'm excited about this last step because it will give me some communication and discussion between classes and grade levels, one of the unique features of a blog discussion. I see this as sort of a precursor to the kind of work that Jason Malone is getting going with his students having discussions with classes from around the world.
So my question is, what can I do to improve the questions I have, and what additional questions or topics could I post for my students to respond to?
From my inquiry group I am hoping to get some feedback about the questions I have already written, and hopefully generate some ideas for additional questions. I think that it's essential for this first discussion to have good topics and questions to discuss.
The next step will be to have the students write and post their own prompts for a second discussion, this one centering around Macbeth. For the final blog discussion of the semester I will have my sophomores write prompts for my ninth graders to respond to. I'm excited about this last step because it will give me some communication and discussion between classes and grade levels, one of the unique features of a blog discussion. I see this as sort of a precursor to the kind of work that Jason Malone is getting going with his students having discussions with classes from around the world.
So my question is, what can I do to improve the questions I have, and what additional questions or topics could I post for my students to respond to?
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Teaching Generation Y
What happened? Where did these kids come from? As a gen-Xer raised by a pair of decidedly baby boomer parents I can't help but look at the latest crop of teenagers and shake my head in wonderment. Aren't all adults supposed to be horrified and disappointed by the rebellious antics of the next generation? Shouldn't we be cringing and bemoaning the fact that our civilization is headed straight to hell? Isn't that the natural order of things?
If you had asked me back in 1989 what I thought the twenty-first century would be like, I would have painted a picture that looked something like the futuristic dystopia of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. I would have argued that the teens of the future would be listening to some new combination of death metal and hard-core gangster rap while watching explicit violence and sexuality on prime-time television and taking insane amounts of some new generation designer drug. It seemed to me that since the idyllic 1950s that I heard so much about we had rapidly descended into a pit of ever-increasing violence, cynicism, angst, and social ills that were frankly impossible to combat.
But the millennium generation seems to have caught on to a cultural wave that I never would have expected. Rock music in general has moved back to a less gritty and more organic, songwriter-oriented sound, gangster rap is slowly giving way to lighter brands of hip hop as the allure of explicit lyrics fades, drug use has fallen, binge drinking has decreased among teens, abstinence has increased, and those teens who are having sex are now much more likely to use condoms than ever before. Who would have thunk it?
I'm not saying that today's kids aren't faced with some serious problems. Crime, violence, drugs, overpopulation, global warming, terrorism, the list goes on. But what does surprise me is that the two previous generations' angst, anger, pessimism, and rebellion seem to have given way to a certain optimism and even enthusiasm for the future. These kids are definitely aware of the problems they face (their boomer and gen-X teachers and parents have made sure of that), but what surprises me is how many of them feel up to the challenge of facing them. According to today's Denver Post, teens in 2005 volunteered twice as much as their parents did in the late nineteen eighties--they really seem to realize that there's a lot that needs to be done, but unlike their parents who just whined about it, they're doing something.
In a year when the biggest cultural phenomenon among kids has been a Disney movie called High School Musical, I'm not so sure anymore that the violent dystopia found on the island in Lord of the Flies is going to resonate with my students the same way it did when I was fifteen and read it for the first time. Seriously, when I was in junior high any movie with the word musical anywhere in the title would have been instantly doomed to utter failure. I can clearly remember having to hide the fact that I had seen just about every musical out there with my theater-going mother ("Don't ever admit that you know show-tunes!" a well-meaning friend of mine once told me earnestly).
So maybe it really is a "brave new world," but one that twentieth-century futurists like Huxley and Golding never would have imagined. Absent the pervasive irony of the twentieth century, a brave new future doesn't sound quite so bad anymore. Although I can't shake the feeling that as a society we're still headed in the wrong direction in so many ways, while working with this new generation of kids I've managed to see a ray of hope for the future that I never thought I'd find in working with a bunch of teenagers.
If you had asked me back in 1989 what I thought the twenty-first century would be like, I would have painted a picture that looked something like the futuristic dystopia of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. I would have argued that the teens of the future would be listening to some new combination of death metal and hard-core gangster rap while watching explicit violence and sexuality on prime-time television and taking insane amounts of some new generation designer drug. It seemed to me that since the idyllic 1950s that I heard so much about we had rapidly descended into a pit of ever-increasing violence, cynicism, angst, and social ills that were frankly impossible to combat.
But the millennium generation seems to have caught on to a cultural wave that I never would have expected. Rock music in general has moved back to a less gritty and more organic, songwriter-oriented sound, gangster rap is slowly giving way to lighter brands of hip hop as the allure of explicit lyrics fades, drug use has fallen, binge drinking has decreased among teens, abstinence has increased, and those teens who are having sex are now much more likely to use condoms than ever before. Who would have thunk it?
I'm not saying that today's kids aren't faced with some serious problems. Crime, violence, drugs, overpopulation, global warming, terrorism, the list goes on. But what does surprise me is that the two previous generations' angst, anger, pessimism, and rebellion seem to have given way to a certain optimism and even enthusiasm for the future. These kids are definitely aware of the problems they face (their boomer and gen-X teachers and parents have made sure of that), but what surprises me is how many of them feel up to the challenge of facing them. According to today's Denver Post, teens in 2005 volunteered twice as much as their parents did in the late nineteen eighties--they really seem to realize that there's a lot that needs to be done, but unlike their parents who just whined about it, they're doing something.
In a year when the biggest cultural phenomenon among kids has been a Disney movie called High School Musical, I'm not so sure anymore that the violent dystopia found on the island in Lord of the Flies is going to resonate with my students the same way it did when I was fifteen and read it for the first time. Seriously, when I was in junior high any movie with the word musical anywhere in the title would have been instantly doomed to utter failure. I can clearly remember having to hide the fact that I had seen just about every musical out there with my theater-going mother ("Don't ever admit that you know show-tunes!" a well-meaning friend of mine once told me earnestly).
So maybe it really is a "brave new world," but one that twentieth-century futurists like Huxley and Golding never would have imagined. Absent the pervasive irony of the twentieth century, a brave new future doesn't sound quite so bad anymore. Although I can't shake the feeling that as a society we're still headed in the wrong direction in so many ways, while working with this new generation of kids I've managed to see a ray of hope for the future that I never thought I'd find in working with a bunch of teenagers.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Remembering the Flood
I'm excited about continuing to work with my class blogs this fall, but in the mean time I've been able to do some traveling and get some writing done. I did some freelance work for Health and Wellness Magazine this summer, but I was also very happy to get a piece of creative non-fiction published.
During the flood of 1997 I happened to be working at a pizza shop right next to the Johnson Mobile Home park that was destroyed, killing five women and destroying dozens of homes. I was deeply emotionally affected by what I witnessed that night and wrote down some of my memories. Then last year I brought out what I had written and prepared it for the Writing Project's author's chair. This year, for the ten-year anniversary of the flood, I submitted it to the Coloradoan and they published it as part of their coverage of the anniversary of the flood. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.
I'll also be on 600 KCOL tomorrow, Saturday the 29th at 7:00 am, to talk about the flood. For those who weren't here ten years ago, it'll be a good opportunity to learn about this sad chapter in the history of the city and for those who were it'll be a chance to look back on the tragedy ten years later. There are a lot of stories to tell, and a lot of myths and misconceptions that still linger which I hope I'll be able to address.
During the flood of 1997 I happened to be working at a pizza shop right next to the Johnson Mobile Home park that was destroyed, killing five women and destroying dozens of homes. I was deeply emotionally affected by what I witnessed that night and wrote down some of my memories. Then last year I brought out what I had written and prepared it for the Writing Project's author's chair. This year, for the ten-year anniversary of the flood, I submitted it to the Coloradoan and they published it as part of their coverage of the anniversary of the flood. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.
I'll also be on 600 KCOL tomorrow, Saturday the 29th at 7:00 am, to talk about the flood. For those who weren't here ten years ago, it'll be a good opportunity to learn about this sad chapter in the history of the city and for those who were it'll be a chance to look back on the tragedy ten years later. There are a lot of stories to tell, and a lot of myths and misconceptions that still linger which I hope I'll be able to address.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Critical Thinking
I think that I have finally created a definition of Critical Thinking that seems to work in the context of a class blog discussion. It's certainly different from the definitions that I surveyed in other contexts.
Critical Thinking in a class blog discussion demonstrates an understanding of the text, the ability to draw conclusions or ask good questions about it, and the ability to engage the ideas of other students or to make connections to previous knowledge, other texts, contexts, or ideas.
I've actually thought about this definition so much that I'm having serious internal debates about the placement of the words "and" and "or." I can't find a combination that I'm perfectly happy with. I think the second "or" should be an "and" . . . maybe. I also think this a sign that I have thought about this too much and need fresh insight.
Critical Thinking in a class blog discussion demonstrates an understanding of the text, the ability to draw conclusions or ask good questions about it, and the ability to engage the ideas of other students or to make connections to previous knowledge, other texts, contexts, or ideas.
I've actually thought about this definition so much that I'm having serious internal debates about the placement of the words "and" and "or." I can't find a combination that I'm perfectly happy with. I think the second "or" should be an "and" . . . maybe. I also think this a sign that I have thought about this too much and need fresh insight.
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