Chapter 10: Going Beyond The Classroom

Chapter 10 of Fires in the Bathroom looked at how a teacher can handle diversity outside the classroom too. The ideas in this chapter were really neat. One activity I liked was when one student explained that twice a week in science, they would go to clean up a park. The idea I liked the most, however, was guiding students to summer activities or camps.
The reason this activity really stuck out to me was because I work at an overnight summer camp based on Quaker values. The campers we get are very diverse, coming from as far away as Pakistan. A lot of children who I could imagine were overlooked in schools or acted out against authority figures gained a lot from the experience, and I gained a lot from working with them to resolve conflicts.

Chapter 9: When Things Go Wrong

Chapter 9 of Fires in the Bathroom focused on one of my greatest fears – what happens if something goes wrong in the classroom? The examples that the chapter gave ranged from school skipping to actual fires in the bathroom. The example that stuck out to me was when a conductor shouted to the drummers, who were playing too loud, “We’re not in Africa.”
I’m greatly interested in music, and may be interested in music education. I was shocked that this happened, and think that no matter what’s going wrong, the teacher always has to be on top of things and in control of his own emotions. Trying to make a racial joke to alleviate a situation is by no means a healthy response, and the conductor should have apologized right away.

Chapter 8: Teaching Teenagers Who Are Still Learning English

Chatper 8 of Fires in the Bathroom was all about students who are still learning the English Language, whether they are learning to speak it or read and write in it. A part of the chapter that jumped out to me was when one of the authors said that they learn best in a classroom that uses both their own language and English. Forcing students to jump directly into a language they are not comfortable with is bad for students’ learning, as it discourages them and makes them feel like outcasts. The students’ comfort should be the first priority – they won’t learn without it.
This section of the reading really jumped out at me because I only speak one language. If I hope to teach my students well, I recognize that I will need to study other languages such as Chinese or Spanish.

Chapter 7&8 Presentation

Our presentation was on the "Caring About Homework" section of the book.  We had a teacher who didn't care about the students' homework, even though he assigned it.  If the teacher is going to take up students' time with homework, then he should definitely be prepared to take the time to care about it.  Homework that doesn't even get checked is a total waste of students' time - it doesn't matter if they got things right or wrong.  It's very important to care about that sort of thing, or students will become discouraged with the class and the teacher.  Also, if the homework doesn't seem to be worth checking, then can it really be that helpful for the student?

Reaction to Behavior 101 Movie

What Would You Do?

If I were in Mr. Fecteau's situation, I would give the student a stern look and say adamantly that he must go to the principal's office and that I would walk him there.  I would, as Mr. Fecteau demonstrated, give the students work to do while I was out of the room for 3 minutes.  If the student physically resisted, I would let him go - a student so determined to leave the building is not going to make the classroom a safe environment - but I would make sure that administrators took the issue seriously.

Teaching Difficult Academic Material

This resource is incredibly helpful. Teaching different material, especially within my content area, is something that I always struggle with. What if the content is just too complex for my class, or more realistically, what if I become obsessed with the prejudice that my class is not ready for the difficult material? Looking at students’ comments, however, it’s pretty clear that students’ minds are pretty much able to take anything in and work with it if it is presented the right way. This paradigm that students have a point where they won’t learn anything should be abandoned, as it’s really detrimental to their learning. Challenging academic material is what I imagine a lot of students need to motivate them to learn. As long as they understand and are challenged, they should strive to learn the content.

Chapter 6: Motivation and Boredom

This chapter was one of my favorites. I have always wanted to be one of those crazy old coots that are wildly passionate about the content, but in a way that connects to the students. If I can show the students how much I care about English, maybe they will too. Keeping kids motivated is something that I think is going to be challenging and interesting. I know that I will have no problem showing pride in students’ good work and caring about their progress. The list of reading materials that many of the students cared about was handy – I may do a questionnaire asking what reading material my students care about.

Teaching to the Group, Working with the Individual

This chapter focused on group work and how the individual learns differently from a group. It seemed kind of hypocritical that the chapter begun by categorizing most students into seven groups before talking about how students learn differently. Later, however, I could see how these categorizations could help when assigning students to different group roles. I liked how the students suggested that the teacher take a more active role in monitoring the groups and making sure that some members don’t dominate other members. There was also a good distinction that while group work makes classes easier and more useful for teachers and students, the progress must be measured individually.

Chapter 4: Creating a Culture of Success

This chapter focused on what a teacher can do to establish the classroom as a place where students feel successful. The pressures from family and peers that a teacher can try to downplay in the classroom can have a huge effect on the likelihood that a student feels able to succeed. The list of things not to do was helpful for me. Obviously, not favoring students is a no-brainer, as is comparing students to other students, but I imagine that when frustrated, having faith and believing in students is easier said than done. One thing that startled me in the chapter was the teacher handout for teachers to categorize students into “usual grade” categories. This idea seemed terrible to me. I think students should be judged by the work they do, and the very existence of this list seems to prejudice teachers.

Chapter 3: Classroom Behavior

This chapter focused on classroom behavior and how the teacher in a classroom should look at classroom behavior in both teacher and student roles as a contract between the parties. Many of the students in the book offered really helpful advice that I plan on taking to my own classroom. I personally disagreed with a few of the strategies, particularly the ones that endorse even mild shaming. I think that making kids sit in the front of the class to “look stupid” probably wouldn’t do much to break the labeling that goes on in classrooms. The tables of effective consequences and indicators of possible sources of student misbehavior were really helpful for me. Strategies like calling parents should be used sparingly.

My Contributions to the WebQuest Wikis

I made two changes to WebQuest Roles, one in self-knowledge and one in persuasion.  I uploaded two examples of WebQuests fitting the descriptions - in Self-Knowledge, I added a WebQuest that looks at heroic traits and how students can foster traits their heroes possess.  In Persuasion, I uploaded a WebQuest in which students determine whether or not Prince Hamlet would be fit to rule Denmark, and then argue their sides in a Senate environment.

In the Audience wiki, the change I made was to the Reality TV page. I uploaded an example of a reality show WebQuest in which contestants must research Korea to brief contestants of an upcoming Survivor: Korea show.

How to help someone use a computer

"A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable."

This thing to tell myself when helping somebody with a computer is a refreshing thing to read.  My Pepere just got a computer a year or two ago, and he uses it for nothing but email.  When he first got it, I tried to get him excited about it and interested in how it works, but I quickly realized that he was only interested in the one thing he got the computer for - staying in touch with his kids more easily and frequently.

"Attend to the symbolism of the interaction. Try to squat down so your eyes are just below the level of theirs. When they're looking at the computer, look at the computer. When they're looking at you, look back at them."

This one stuck out to me because I know that this is difficult when you're trying to help somebody with a computer problem.  This goes along with the rule about taking the keyboard away - for some reason, computer problems seem to be the most urgent thing in the world when you know what the problem is.  It's easy to just want to take over the situation for the person requesting help, but that doesn't help them at all.

If I'm teaching somebody to use Google Earth, it'll be easier than usual to attend to symbolism of the interaction - the controls are somewhat intuitive, but it's easy to fall into a place as another person who's just in awe of the amazing technology of the program, instead of a "guru."

In response to and quoting http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html.

Copyright and Fair Use LR

16. At a local electronics show, a teacher buys a machine that defeats the copy protection on DVDs, CD-ROMs, and just about everything else. She lets her students use it so they can incorporate clips from rented DVDs into their film genre projects. This is fair use.

This is the one that really surprised me.  Not only was the author really flippant about the answer (that you can rip content for educational purposes), but the answer itself surprised me.  Digital protection is supposed to be like a safe - either you can't get in at all, or you can only get in under the owner's circumstances.  Cracking the digital protection, even for educational purposes, would be like breaking the padlock on somebody's door. It seems to me that the excuse that technological blocking and legal blocking are different things is a bit off.  The content is blocked for a reason - you wouldn't tell somebody they couldn't put a password on their own content.

Copyright and Fair Use SR

7 - Faculty and Family Website

I was surprised that this one was allowed - it seems to me like any project that uses copyright material without permission shouldn't be on the web.

10 - Clipart and Music Lesson Plan

This one half-surprised me. I understand not using music taken from file sharing in a lesson plan. But publicly available things like WebQuests have clipart all over them, yet they can be accessed by anybody - not only teachers. Why is sharing a lesson plan any different?

11 - Frontier Homes

I think this one's a stretch. I don't see the instructional value of "making fun of the spoiled family from California."

12 - Movie Rental Ripping

I was really surprised about this one. To see my thoughts on movie ripping, see my longer response.

13 - Holocaust Survivor Interview 

I was somewhat surprised about this one. I'm glad that it does work both ways. It definitely lends itself to making the Web a place of intellectual exchange.

14 - Disney VHS

As much as I know it's not covered under Fair Use, this one makes me angry, if only because it's just one location change away from being considered legal.  If a local parent offered to host a "party" for younger siblings, then it would have been fine (or at least spared the taboo of inappropriate use).

18 - Ethnic CD

This one could have used a little more explanation in the answer.  Royalty-free music, to the best of my knowledge, is a little hard to find.  I'd like to see that chart on page 32 of this magazine.

20 - Science Fair Multimedia

This item made me angry too.  The answer seems to imply that not only can the school not sell the CD (which I agree makes sense), but that they cannot give the CD away to students, as that might account as "wider distribution."

Web 2.0 Educator

The Web 2.0-using educator that I have chosen is Bill Ferriter, a 6th grade language arts teacher in North Carolina who runs the blog The Tempered Radical.  Bill Ferriter's emphasis is on reading skills, especially in recent posts: he recently conducted a virtual conversation with Kelly Gallagher, the author of a book called Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.  Bill believes that technology can help teachers be more adept at observing student reading abilities and improving them: one blog post explains how teachers can organize students in an Excel spreadsheet and use advanced Excel organizational techniques to determine who needs the most help to meet the bare standards, so the teacher can focus on imbibing them with a love of reading.  Another post, which looks at an interview between Bill Gates and Jonathan Alter, discusses how we don't need "highly qualified teachers, only highly effective ones" and ignoring technology would be resisting important changes.

Let me give you an example (which I've mentioned on the Radical before): My master's degree is in "advanced teaching techniques." I earned it in 1997. Do you think that the strategies I learned from college professors who hadn't been in classrooms since the early '80s in 1997 would still qualify as "advanced teaching today?"

This blog has a lot of attitude and I think his thoughts on technology, literacy, and education are hopeful and passionate.  I've subscribed to his blog's feed and will keep an eye on it.

Type I and Type II Technology

Type I technology seems to apply to technology that supplements ordinary skills, and has a predetermined single purpose that is built into the technology; there is a given amount of information in the technology that is merely accessed by the user. Type II technology is open-ended and while it may not have information or facts designed into it to be accessed, it allows for the user to assume an active role in the program.

Examples of Type I technology include Jump Start Typing, a typing teaching program that we used in my middle school to teach us to type on computer keyboards. Another example is Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, which came on my family’s old computer – this was just a virtual encyclopedia that was easy to search. A third example of Type I technology is The Oregon Trail, a historical computer game that has a predesigned course giving a degree of variation to the player’s decisions.

Examples of Type II technology include the TI-83 graphing calculators we used in my high school math classes. These calculators had programming capacity, and we were taught how to make basic programs. I went above and beyond and learned how to make animations and geometry programs on the calculator. Another example is the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel, which has functions programmed into it, but virtually infinite uses for the functions. A final example of Type II technology would be something like Adobe Photoshop, which has many features, but leaves the core and bulk of the content to the user.

Type II Applications of Technology in Education: New and Better Ways of Teaching and Learning – Cleborne Maddux and D. LaMont Johnson from Educational Microcomputing: The Need for Research (1984).

My MEL Experiences

• Student/teacher relationship: In my junior year AP US History class, my teacher exemplified all of the qualities Muir lists for a good relationship. He did things like play songs having to do with history and culture and had an amazing sense of humor with students. He made a very safe environment for students, especially when we had debates in class.  
  
• Helping Students Succeed: My freshman year math teacher had high expectations and very high confidence in our abilities. He had a knack for making sure that every single student in the class had a deep understanding of the concepts we were dealing with before he would move on to anything else.  It may have made the class move a little slower, but he was confident that every student could get it - and every one did!
• Hands-On: During my junior year, my English teacher was finding it difficult to teach poetry (poetry was rarely addressed in my school system, and I think she tried to implement it herself).  She figured that the best way she could teach us about writing poetry was to print off descriptions of different poem styles like acrostics, sonnets, haikus, or sestinas and having us write examples in class, letting us read them to the class the next day.
• Avoid Rewards: Once in an English class, we were asked if we wanted to have a short story reading for stories we had written in class. The students agreed that we would like to if we could make hot chocolate and bring in cookies, and the teacher agreed. However, on the day of the reading, we were too busy eating and drinking, and only a few people shared their stories. It was also hard for us to do sharing in the future because we would always request that type of thing again.
• Context: My senior English class dedicated a unit to writing for the real world, including college essays, job applications, business letters, and other professional writing. It wasn't as in depth as other professional writing I've learned to do since then, but it was definitely valuable at the time, especially the college essay portion.

Learning Style Inventory Results

The results of this seem only somewhat accurate. I tend not to think of myself as a social learner. Also, I think the visual section may be underrepresented – vision is very important to learning as I’ve known it, but I ranked very low in the visual learning style. I know I’m a solitary, verbal, and aural learner, but besides that I’m skeptical about this inventory’s accuracy.

Test and image from http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/results.asp

Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

I was taken aback by the answers that students gave about popularity. When some of the authors were saying they would rather have a really good teacher than a likeable teacher, I remembered how in high school, my peers would get excited if they had an easy or likeable teacher, and seemed to neglect the quality of the teacher. This chapter makes it clear that kids are just as interested in their education as the teacher is.

I guess the reason this surprised me was for some reason I’ve grown this social paradigm where students are supposed to prefer easy teachers to good ones. I suppose I always imagined students saw school in a short-term egotistical view and worry more about the present than the future. It’s certainly good to know that that’s not the case.

Chapter 1: Knowing Students Well

I was surprised that the chapter suggested asking students about their daily schedules. I could relate with this, even without having a busy schedule crowded by sports. The author was saying that because students can have surprisingly busy schedules and teachers are somewhat detached from extracurriculars in most situations, teachers should try hard to understand the time requirements of students, along with getting to know them better.

I think the reason this jumped out at me was because I went to a very small school where teachers often were involved with most extracurricular activities, and had a better-than-average understanding of other things demanding students’ time. Even with a vague understanding, I recognize it is better to have a clear and spelled-out estimate of how much free time students can devote to schoolwork.