Confession: Bailout

One of my biggest weaknesses this first quarter has been creating a logical, organized system of assignments and grades.  Its understandable considering that I've never done it before, but my whole system has just sucked ... seriously.

In the beginning, I just collected everything.  Everything was treated as if it was life or death.  This stemmed from my own sense of inadequacy in both asking students to do anything and in my lack of confidence of why we were doing it.  As a result, I've got piles of papers, much of which has been thrown away, some of which gets filtered through to help boost student scores by giving them more chances to score on stuff.

It gets worse.  I've been horrible at keeping track exactly what was to be handed in when.  Some classes handed in assignments that I simply forgot to ask other classes to hand in.  Sometimes I would forget until the bell pretty much to remind about handing stuff in.  I almost feel bad for my students, it must be confusing and frustrating to keep track of everything.  Not entirely, there are at least 15 students that keep good track of everything to be handed in and do so beautifully.  However, knowing myself, I would have really struggled in my class so far.

As a result, I've decided to implement a "mercy-based" grading policy this first quarter by extending deadlines on almost all assignments for all students.  This week I've had students flocking around my desk at the whiff of possible make-up work.  I've had students that were failing hand in 6-8 assignments and suddenly shoot up to a C-.  I've also had students that have a 16% do nothing and not show up for anything.  She makes me really mad.

I don't plan on doing this next semester.  I'm actually really glad for a new grading period.  Its kind of like a fresh start.  I'll be doing things differently this time - clearly documenting all assignments due online and when - so students have to go find out for themselves.  Also, I need to do better at getting students feedback several times a week.  But to do that requires time to grade, and thus far most of my time goes to planning.  Hopefully I can do better this next quarter.  In the meantime, I'll just give my students a big nasty bailout so that I don't have to defend my horrific grading malfeasance.  

For the first time, I feel like I'm teaching ...

Since my Unit 2 test last Wednesday, I've embarked on a new project in chronological world history teaching that I think is working out better than I had anticipated.  

My Unit 2 was awkward.  It was an ill-fated attempt to use the textbook, as I decided to teach the Prologue to the book - looking back now it is a bizarro tribute to democracy and judeo-christian tradition as the foundations for the modern world as we know it.  Even if such is the case, the treatment in this section is really biased at best and at worst utterly confusing to teach as some sort of "prologue" to modern world history.  

My teaching of this section reflected this.  I was jumbled, unclear about what exactly the point of learning this was.  If I were to ask myself why we were really learning this it was, well ... its the first part of the textbook.  The worst part was that I could barely explain why we were learning it.  I didn't even get to the point where we put the different pieces together until the study review.  I caught myself explaining everything the day before the test and I thought to myself I should be doing this every day.  

Of course I know better than to just teach from the textbook, but to be honest, I'm completely burnt out on lesson planning, or planning in general.  I have quickly become the result of the idea of a 1st year teacher being entirely left to plan a year of World History given only an 11 year old textbook without any guiding curriculum, assistance, or other resources to create quality lessons.  I am pretty much out of tricks.

This doesn't mean I'm not still trying.  It just means that I've, perhaps positively, accepted the reality that this is going to be an uphill struggle, and that I can't expect myself to pull off a teaching masterpiece every day.  I've tried, and I can't.  

I have learned, however, that the textbook is not the answer.  Textbooks suck.  They suck the life right out of history.  They are like the enemy, and anything the enemy says is acidic bile to be violently spewed from one's brain in the minutes after your test.  I know this, I've been a student.  

So I've decided to take a new direction, to do my best to walk the middle ground: somewhere between the soul-less drudgery of the textbook lessons, with all of the question and answer worksheets, graphic organizers, and searching out a verbatim answer that students rarely understand - and the exciting, activity-based realm of history as a life-experience, learning to view the world, and the past through the eyes, or even better, perspectives of others.  This is where students learn to think outside of themselves and mature as they slowly open their minds to the remote possibility that others might have had it worse off than them.  

I feel like I've gotten a glimpse of the prior, and it is brutal.  It is the history I hate (to teach).  It is when things don't quite make sense because the textbook becomes the authority not the student.  

I feel like I'm slowly getting a glimpse of the latter.  I've been using a History Channel video called the "Dark Ages" to introduce my students to the Middle Ages.  Its been good to help students come to know multiple players, places, and events because it provides them with tons of visuals and context references for them to sequence and process material.  It isn't perfect, but with frequent stops and multiple reviews, I feel like the big picture of why we are learning this is slowly unfolding while we are learning, as opposed to the study review.  

I feel like I'm trying to put it all together for my students every day.  I think they understand and appreciate my transparency, they are definitely more receptive to the content than they've been, and I can tell by the increased participation in key students that the ideas are getting through better.  

Of course, I'm giving an open note quiz tomorrow so we'll see how it goes.  I'll post an update in a week or so.

My Brightest Diamond: "Golden Star"

Stumbled on this while wasting time before grading tests on a Saturday afternoon.  I first heard of My Brightest Diamond a few years ago, but her songs are continually haunting and impressive.

Confession: I have no idea what I'm doing

So I just today had a brief meeting with one of my students, who just so happened to have missed probably 50% of class out of the last 2-3 weeks.  She hasn't handed in a single assignment, and has no idea what is going on in my class.  Meanwhile, I've just stood by as she occasionally comes and goes, quietly expresses that she has no idea, and I give her some smaller assignment to work on because in the thick of class it is really hard to focus on things like that adequately.  

Finally I got to sit down with her today and realized that she has no idea what is going on - and then some.  Even trying to explain about the beginnings of democracy, I quickly came to realize that she didn't know what government was, a citizen was - she couldn't even tell me anything about what democracy is.  She said she'd never heard of it before.  So I explained about each of them.  Then I went to explain how Greece is significant because democracy developed there, and I realized she had no idea about what Greece was or when 600 BC was.  So I explained about the timeline from BC to AD and how it works like a mathematical graph, with little success.  When it seemed like she understood the way BC and AD worked, I started explaining the developments of Solon - the first leader of Greece in 600 BC.  But I realized that she had no idea what social classes were, or what hereditary meant, or even what a council was.  So I told her to read the first 4 pages (something she should have done 2 weeks ago) and take notes and write down any questions she has so that we can discuss them.

I think this is one of the more profound learning experiences I've had in teaching thus far, as I've seen on a more personal, one on one basis what it means to not expect background knowledge, and how to acquaint myself with the often nuanced hurdles that students will face as they are forced into entire portions of text that lay out historical developments.  Do they understand when and where this is happening?  Do they understand why they are reading it?  Do they understand what they are supposed to be learning, or remember from the text?  I think from now on, when I approach new material, I'm going to do it as if I were speaking directly to this student, and adjust my work to be certain that students understand the basics before I proceed to have them understand the deeper concepts.  

One immediate thought I have is that I've been perpetually vexed with the need to distinguish my honors class from my regular class.  The sheer weight and demand for thought and planning to prepare for one class has been up until this point almost unbearable that I've just been unable to prepare for both classes.  Furthermore, I haven't had a clue as to how I would make the two courses different - I didn't know how each class was different, or what they could handle.  But I think now I'm starting to get it.  I think I need to direct my regular class to smaller steps towards this one student's level to make sure that all the students understand the basic, general concepts.  I also think that in a way, I've already been running my class on the whole like an honors class.  I think that out of fear of not testing my students hard enough I've really cranked up the questions, pace, and depth of my expectations, and I can see that it has been just too much for my regular class.  I can see now the need to carefully examine every paragraph for every concept that might need to be introduced and make sure that students in my regular classes receive more scaffolding than I've been providing up until this point.  

Overall, I will probably refer to this day mentally for a long time in my lesson planning, as I try to reduce everything to its simplest parts before I really try to build up to and explain, let alone expect the students to understand let alone "synthesize" to speak in Bloom-ological terms.  I would rather my students really understand a few simple important concepts, than marginally and confusedly attempt to put out some sort of higher level analysis on abstract concepts they don't, nor will they ever probably understand.

Late night saturday confession ....

So I've been grading quizzes that I "administered" on Wed. and I think that I'm realizing that I didn't teach very well what was on the quiz. Since my Unit 1 test, I've moved into the prologue of our Modern World History textbook, which deals, either somewhat arbitrarily or as a distinct gesture towards western-centric historiography, with the "rise of democratic ideals." 

The text is clumsy, and can hardly be taught in concept without sounding like some puppet for the textbook writers, who obviously wanted to frame everything that happened since 1300 until now within some sort of democracy-uber-alles context. And while I can understand the importance of democracy in shaping the modern world, I haven't bought into to why the book presents it the way it does, and I think my teaching has reflected that.

So I've basically been giving my students a painful assortment of worksheets and questions to get them exposed to the material. Also, for 2-3 days I had my students create some befuddled skits on the Magna Carta, which not only took longer to complete than justifiable, but I'm not sure left my students with the lasting, multi-perspective understanding of the Magna Carta that the activity intended. Not to mention, the Magna Carta is hardly even a paragraph in the book, but we seem to have obsessed over it. 

All in all, I'm realizing the role that I must take in presenting the material in clear, coherent ways, which I haven't done, and I can tell because my students are not able to put the big picture together, as evidenced by their almost 80% failing of the quiz. Its ok, it will be a learning moment for them, as I'm going to have them create a study guide out of the quiz using the answers to extract valuable information, and for me, I'm going to take a different approach to presenting and testing a chunk of information in the future.

Update: btw, I've been working on backwards design with my department chair, and it is really helping me to have a clearer idea of where I want my students to go with the material and how to get them there. I'll be posting more on my unit in the coming week.