Se Hace Camino Al Andar

I viewed Farenheit 9/11 with my Freshmen last week, and I’d like to keep going with the theme of political/social protest and the role of the media in public controversy. I also want to work on some Regents skills with them, as they head into tenth grade. So, I’m doing a non-fiction unit that will give them practice in Tasks 1 and 2 on the ELA Regents without making the focus entirely on test prep. As a matter of fact, I might not even tell them that what we are doing is Regents prep!

Here’s what on tap for tomorrow (I borrowed liberally from Tim Fredrick’s wiki and from a NYT lesson plan):

The lesson is centered around a NY Times article on Patriotism and The Press. I borrowed and adapted the opening activity for the NY Times lesson, which gives students four statements about freedom of speech, the media and the government, ask them to agree or disagree. I changed the wording on some of the statements, since my students are all low-level, and I want them to be able to do this activity on their own. I changed it from a group activity to a true Do Now activity, as well. You can download the (RTF)handout I made here.

After the kids finish the Do Now, we’ll discuss their responses and take an informal poll.

The skill that I want to focus on in this lesson is listening and note-taking, the skills tested by Task 1 on the ELA Regents. Before I read the newspaper article, I’ll distribute a note-taking sheet that has the vocabulary words printed on one side of the page, and two columns, one for the first reading of the article, and another for the second reading, for recording whatever they missed the first time around.

From there, I’ll lead another discussion using some of the questions provided by the NY Times lesson plan, and play off what directions the kids decide to go in.

I’ll follow up on this lesson the next day with a little quiz that will assess the effectiveness of their note-taking, before going into a mini-lesson on note-taking (a discussion of their own observations about the notes they took and what kinds of things they wrote down, then making a list of criteria for how we know something is important enough to write down, but that’s another blog post!). Eventually, we’ll go into actually writing the Task 1 essay.

Link: Your Days in Sentences.

On Friday afternoon, I attended a presentation given by Region 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Region 9 launched their new “American History Museum Pass.” Every teacher at the presentation was given a three year museum pass for admission to 20 museums in New York City, for FREE. You can see the list of museums here, at my Trailfire account. I’m not a social studies teacher but a lot of my teaching involves reaching into historical events, which is natural for English teachers, I think, especially those that teach AP English, like I do. Much like visual art, literature is highly contextual.
I’m very excited about my museum pass and I plan to exploit as much as possible, especially since the MOMA pass is only good until September 2007 (one of two exceptions to the rule–the other is Cooper-Hewitt, for which we received a one-time pass).

Remember the Professional Writer’s Retreat that I was involved with? This weekend, the group is heading to New Jersey for a weekend of writing but I won’t be joining them. I decided, in the end, it was too much. It took awhile for plans for the retreat to be firmed up, and I, all of a sudden, had a full docket for this weekend. My sister is running her first marathon on Sunday, on the Jersey shore, and two good friends of mine are celebrating a birthday Saturday night, not to mention that my mother is in town all weekend. So, I made the decision to forgo the weekend away.

Next weekend, May 4th-5th is the NYCWP Tech Retreat. I’ll be co-facilitating with Paul Allison and some of the members of the Tech Thursdays group. It promises to be a productive and enjoyable retreat, so if you’re interested, it’s not too late to sign up! E-mail me for more details or head over My NYCWP for information and a registration form. We’ll be spending time talking about blogging with students, introducing a neat website called Trailfire, as well as officially launching the new NYCWP site. Participants will receive a modest stipend, dinner on Friday night and breakfast on Saturday morning. Our hope is that retreat participants will walk away with the confidence to use Web 2.0 tools in their classroom, and on their own, as well!

This summer, Ken Stein and I will be running the NYCWP Summer Tech Invitational Seminar. The seminar begins on July 9th and runs for three weeks. We’ll be posting an official flyer with application details next week but if you’d like more information, e-mail me! We’ll be offering CUNY credits to participants (it is also possible that participants may opt for a monetary stipend instead of credits, but that isn’t official yet…shhh!) Ken and I hope to expand upon the work started in next weekend’s retreat and cover more ground in the Web 2.0 arena, in terms of classroom applications. I, in particular, would like to focus on teacher-blogging as a medium for reflective practice and networking.

Summer plans are starting to fall in place! After the seminar, the fiance and I will heading across country on a road trip, and camping along the way. We’re hoping to hit Glacier National Park and Yellowstone (though we won’t camp at Yellowstone). I’d also like to see the new Ice Age trail that is being developed in Wyoming (?). Our trip will end up in the Bay Area, which I’m super excited about because I’ll finally be able to check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium!But I’ll get a little taste of camping Memorial Day weekend when we head to Mohawk Trail State Forest in the Berkshires for a little car camping. (A long weekend is too short for a backcountry camping trip, a huge undertaking, so I’ll have to be satisfied with car camping for now!)

By the way, if you haven’t yet, check out Classroom 2.0, a ning site whose membership is a veritable Who’s Who in the education blogsphere.

Link: The Education Wonks: The Carnival Of Education: Week 116 – Thoughts And Ideas Freely Exchanged.

Link: dy/dan � Blog Archive � Carnival of Education 115.

So, I’m in this wierd place now where I have no problem getting up in the morning and going to school to teach. In fact, I am much enjoying my classes at the moment. We’re reading great books and the kids are behaving well. And yet, I have no desire to write lesson plans, to read my teacher books, to grade papers, and so on. I already know in my head what I’m teaching, where I’m going, what materials I want to use…I just don’t feel like writing it down. I’m tired of coming up with Aims and Do Nows. I don’t mind jotting down my plan for the day, if that’s what the Powers-To-Be want to see but I’m sick of writing out full-length lesson plans. It seems sort of redundant. We do pretty much the same thing every day– read the book, discuss, do some kind of reflection/processing activity. We have so little class time, that I like to jump right into the material with very little prelude or run-up. If I thought my kids needed that prelude, then I would slow down and do that, but they can all keep up with me, I’m pretty sure.

We’re in the home stretch as far as the school year goes, so I feel I am muddling through, but am not quite burned out. I lost my motivation sometime before Spring Break and I’ve tried hard to reclaim it but to no avail. I love teaching, I love working with adolescents but sometimes I question whether I really should be a teacher. I have lousy organizational skills, I’m a total slacker and I’m horrible at discipline. I probably have too much on my plate and if I wasn’t so preoccupied with this tech stuff and my second job, both of which I enjoy a lot more right now than my day job, I would be more with it.

I need a kick in the ass. Internet?

Link: Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies – New York Times.

Link: Sol LeWitt – Art – New York Times.