I have nine teaching days left (really, 11 but two of those are given over to department-wide final exams). Here’s my plan:
1. Spend two days finishing up the story of the Cyclops and doing a story map.
2. Do a final exam review on day 3.
3. After the final exam, read the story of Odysseus killing the suitors, both the Colum version and the Fagles over the course of two days. I’ll use the text rendering exercise I learned at Bard College for the Fagles version.
4. Show The Odyssey with Armand Assante for three days.
5. The last day will be given over to writing reflections and doing evaluations of the class/my teaching.
All done. Two weeks for Regents, then a day for handing out report cards. How time flies!
I took my Ramp-Up kids to the Irish Hunger Memorial and the N-Y Historical Society today. Let me tell you, being with these kids all day, ALONE, is so so tiring. In any case, they completed the booklet I made…part of it. When we got to the N-Y Historical Society, they were so engrossed in looking at the collection that I didn’t have the heart (nor the energy) to bug them about the booklet. Some of them did it, though…next time, I’ll take the time to go over the booklet BEFORE we leave for the trip because they weren’t focussed on a mission when we went into the museum.
It was a beautiful day and we walked through Central Park in search of a basketball court which never appeared. It was a long walk for the kids but hey, they needed it, the lazy litle buggers. A chance to commune with nature and all that!
NCTE: Has anyone ever taken a workshop with NCTE? Are they any good?
I went down to the Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City to case the joint for tomorrow’s field trip. I think the kids will like it and I took some notes for a scavenger hunt they’ll have to do while we’re there. First of all, the grassy area of the memorial rises off a platform that is wrapped around with quotes from various sources relating to the Irish, the famine, the politics, etc. I found a couple of good ones. One is a line from an old Irish song about why the Irish left Ireland. The second is a quote from Pataki about why the memorial was built and the third is an ironic quote from an article in an Irish newspaper, about how they’ve covered the potato famine in the United States and they’re sure it’ll never happen in Ireland. I’ll ask them to find the quotes (I’ll identify the source), then reflect on the meaning of the quotes…the quote from the Irish paper, I’ll ask them what the irony of the quote is.
So, you walk around this raised platform to the entrance of a cottage that was moved from Ireland to NY for the memorial, a pretty little stone cottage. You walk through the cottage to a path that winds through the grassy area, ending at 25 feet above the ground with a view of the Statue of Liberty and New Jersey. This grassy area is planted with flora and fauna native to Ireland and is dotted with big boulders carved with the name of an Irish county. One of the questions is to speculate on what these names are.
Hopefully, the weather will hold out like it did today. The weather definitely makes it easier to appreciate the beauty of the place. Click the picture for more photos of the memorial.
Update: You can download the booklet I created for the field trip here. Scroll down and click the link that says Historical Fiction Scavenger Hunt. It’ll download as a Word document but the formatting may be off, if you are on a PC or if you have an older version of Word. Enjoy and I welcome feedback!
Tomorrow, I’m taking my Ramp-Up kids to the New York Historical Society to browse the The Henry Luce III Center. We were supposed to do a program called Objects as Stories, but I found out on Friday that no educator would be available. I can still bring the kids there but I’ll have to do the tour on my own. Thank goodness for the internet. The Luce Center website contains the entire catalog, so I was able to poke around and figure out what I want to do. This is what I’ve decided on:
The purpose of the visit is twofold–one, to explore the time period of the book we are reading, A Family Apart, and two, to explore the time period of the kids’ respective short stories. They will do a pre-visit writing: Describe an object you or your family owns that has a story behind it. How old is it? How did it end up in your family? Why is it important? Who takes care of it?. Once we get to the museum, they’ll do two small scavenger hunts after an introduction to the collection. The first hunt is to find five items in five different categories associated with the time of A Family Apart, the late 1800′s. They’ll have to identify the object and explain its purpose, maybe draw a sketch of it. The second hunt is the same, except the objects will be related to whatever time period their short stories are set in. All this will be on a single worksheet or I’ll make little observation booklets for them.
Before this, though, we will be visiting the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. I’m taking a little trip down there today to check it out. Hopefully, I’ll have a little brainstorm about what we’ll do there…
Jenny D.: My Dissertation, Chapter One: Funny how what seems obvious to most teachers, requires an academic to fly across the country to discover. Even funnier is the realization that good teachers plan their lessons is supposed to be an astounding finding, worthy of a breakthrough moment in someone’s thesis. Of course, if the academics who study education were actually educators at some point, it wouldn’t have been so remarkable to find that:
“What this revealed to me is that good teaching, demanding teaching, is preplanned, deliberate, and thought out. The moves teachers make aren’t random, but in fact they are considered. The best teachers consider how to use their voice, their body, and their ideas. They evaluate students by responses to question, even as they think up the next questions.”
What else did she think good teaching was? That it was innate or something? Frightening how clueless academics are…
I went to DeAf Jam last night at the Bowery Poetry Club (Ms. Frizz, were you there? I looked for you!) and aside from Bob Holman being a complete dork, the show was awesome. There’s a lot that I could say about the show but I’m still processing, so later for that. For now, enjoy the blurry pictures (damn deafies wouldn’t stop moving!).
Jazz, Baby – a photoset on Flickr: Because I have friends in high places, I got to see Taj Mahal last night for free!
My contribution to the Arts Festival Banquet tomorrow afternoon. Yummy!
Today was a much better day…sort of. My Ramp-Up kids have been working on historical fiction short stories but they have been slacking off…a lot! I told them today that I was thinking about not letting anyone go on the field trip next Tuesday unless I have a draft in my hand of their stories. But I also handed out post-it notes and had them write down whatever questions they had about the assignment, whatever they didn’t understand, etc. The number one question was “How do I begin?”, so I reminded them of all the books we read and how they started. One girl even volunteered up her beginning, which was really good, something about a rainy day in the Dominican Republic. I spent lots of time hocking them today to stay focused on their writing and all of them were writing except for one slacker kid who never does anything anyway, if he bothers to come to class at all! So, I felt good about that class today.
Third period, I asked them to paraphrase the story of Calypso and Odysseus for me and I explained to them by paraphrasing the story, they were showing me they understood it. They couldn’t paraphrase it, even though we’d been reading the story for days! It was a combination of them not paying attenion and my tendency to move quickly. So, today, we slowed down a little and made a story map together that outlined the basic details of the story. A little better. I even got to read the beginning of the Cyclops story to them, before the bell rang.
Seventh period was the same story, so I showed them the story map I had made with third period, had them copy it and ran through it like three times! The third time, I really hyper about it and really ad-libbing because dammit, why couldn’t they get it! But they did…I think! We’ll see. They’re having a quiz tomorrow.
The ESL class that I took over…I don’t want to talk about them, except to say they are the most obnoxious bunch of kids I’ve had the displeasure of meeting. Actually, it’s just one small vocal group of about six kids. They are just downright ruuuude. I don’t know what to do about them. Calling home is a pain because they come from Spanish-speaking families and it’s hard to track down a Spanish-speaking teacher that has time to help me with the phone call. Letters don’t arrive quick enough. Plus, the ire that such home contact would inspire on the part of the kids is so not worth it…I can tell they are the type to not submit quietly and would make the next three weeks a living hell. I think I’ll just stop talking to them.
Check out my Trash Run slideshow on Flickr. Set the speed to 1 second!
