Feb. 11, 2016 Today's Good Ideas

I'm writing down these activities before I forget them:

• In FYC, I had students DRAW the evidence that they will submit to me at the end of the ICO Project.
• Today was a workshop on finalizing the ICO Proposal Memo. Students had drafted on Tuesday and given that draft to me. In my reading of and commenting on the drafts, I noticed that many were not thinking in terms of concrete evidence for the successful completion of their project, so I came up with this idea:
• Visualize what your evidence (worth 50 points!) will look like on May 3
• Draw that visualization
• The best ones were detailed: 10 worksheets, 5 poems, 15 punctuation tests
• The not-best ones were metaphorical (a colorful bee to represent spelling) or process-oriented (stick figure going to the Writing Center)
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• In EXPRESS, after the usual "paragraph buster" and "color-coding hamburger" exercise, I had students text the folks who were not in class to say we missed them.
• Prentia - Abdul, Jacorey, Blong
• Katie - Abbey, Payton, Vanessa
• Lorena - Jen, Diedre, Ben

"This game is well known."

This weekend at an antique mall, I bought a book from 1923 called Four Hundred Games for School, Home, and Playground (Ethel F. Acker, F.A. Owen Publishing Company, Dansville, N.Y.).

I bought it because 1) it was $3.00 and 2) I opened it to page 159 to find a language game called "Composition Relay" that began like this:

"This game is well known. Besides furnishing an exercise in grammatical construction, capitals, and punctuation, it is a good drill in spelling and penmanship."

Hmm, I thought, to whom would this game be well known? What would teaching be like if this game was still well known? Here it is:

"Each row of players forms a team. The last player in each row at a given signal runs forward, writes the first word of a sentence on the blackboard, runs to his seat, and hands the chalk to the next player, who writes the next word. The last player writes a word to complete the sentence and adds the necessary punctuation. The points are usually scored as follows: Speed 25 points, grammatical construction 25, spelling 25, and writing 25. If played during the grammar drill period the score should be: Speed 50, analysis 50. No badly written sentences should be considered."

So I love almost everything about this paragraph:

• the second sentence's parallel structure, which mitigates the overload of prepositional phrases
• the way points are "usually" awarded (imagine having to write legibly in chalk when you're rushing, your teammates are hurrying you)
• the assumption that a "grammar drill period" is usual, well known, common
• the last sentence! It's passive verb is so great
• the fact that students are *moving* in the classroom while they're learning language skills (can you say "kinetic learners"? Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences didn't appear until 60 years later!)
  

How I wish we could reintroduce these physical movements in our classrooms -- at all levels. I like my students to move . . . rearranging them to create sentences ("you're an independent clause, you're a dependent clause, you're a comma -- rearrange yourselves!")

But moving requires space. With federal constraints on education professionals, we end up dropping out these kinds of activities . . . phy ed classes get cut! That's simply unjust, not to mention unwise. Students find a way to move -- often inappropriately.

It should be "well known" that physical activity is essential for learning. Ethel F. Acker says it this way:

"Probably no other single theory in the field of education has made greater progress in the minds of educators and laymen in the past few years than that of the importance of organized play" (11 emphasis added).

Does she look like me?

Must Watch

Check out Lawrence (Larry) Lessig's talk at/for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), a most amazing, smart, necessary, relevant thing:

The "mash ups" at about 10:00 impress me: the voices of "young people" on the screen. How do we get more people to understand and have this conversation?

It worked, maybe

I had a brainstorm the other day about a trick to lessen students' obsession with grades to the exclusion of feedback. If you teach writing, you might know what I mean:

Students look at the grade/score on an essay and come up to talk, saying things like, "What did you take off for? I did everything you said to do." or "What didn't you like in my essay? I thought it was good."

I often say, "Did you take a look at my comments? If you didn't understand something, I'd be happy to talk with you to explain what I meant."

Often, students haven't looked at them (let alone read them!). That always bothers me because writing comments is where I've spent time teaching, offering feedback designed to help them become better writers.

So the trick? Don't total their scores. Here's how.

I use a rubric for evaluating essays: five criteria categories that can earn 20 points each. This year, I've decided to just list the values in each category, and students have to do the addition themselves.

Yesterday, in FYC (my most juvenile, disruptive, unlikable class of the last five years), I didn't get one single person up to the desk at the end of class! Hooray. I had an email later last night, but it was a question about revising her essay, proof that she'd read my comments.

Tentative conclusion: this trick works. We'll see what happens with today's FYC, a class full of responsible, engaging, thoughful students.