Back at School

I came back inspired. I feel strongest about the lecture from Diego Navarro because he teaches the kids I have now 5 to 7 years later. He spoke to healing the injuries (I'm at the site where these injuries can easily occur). We have the kids wanting to go to college but there are a lot of obstacles and statistics are not encouraging. Of my students who do go to college only 30% can expect to be successful. The students I work with are so smart and capable yet so many are failing school. My hope is to help the students find ways to be successful and to support them in initiating their own learning. So between

A. Diego Navarro (finding ways to let these kids know how smart and capable they are and helping them succeed instead of failing them because they aren't working in class or doing the homework),

B. Sugata Mitra (I am determined to have 10 IPADs in my class so every block can work in groups of 4 to research at will, and on the fly, and of their own volition tapping into their own natural curiosity.)

C. Christopher Rush (Can we find a way to be flexible enough to let students not only learn in the way that suits them but also show mastery in a variety of ways? How can we do this logistically in a school with a student teacher ratio of 36 to one and few resources?)

D. Salman Khan - Can we integrate the use of his videos in order to enable students study the work without a teacher who is inadvertently or not, making them feel stupid? Can we create a flexible work space for students?

I had a field trip as soon I got back. We took all the 8th graders to see a play at a new performing arts high school. They had a wonderful time! The play was very long but they were a great audience. I think it is possible that most of the students had never been to a theatre production and one said (very excitedly), "This was better than any movie." The Crucible is perfect for middle school kids. Anyway I thought of Word Nik as one of the students described the production as being very commotional. The play had a lot of action in the aisles and it really was "commotional".

I just went into WordNik signed up and discovered a funny exchange about the word "commotional", a CNN reporter reporting live said the scene was very "commotional" the newscaster said back "Did you just say "commotional"? I tagged myself there as "middle school living language".

I'm going to to keep this blog up for a while as I continue to make connections between the fest and my own teaching.

I also want to try and find a video of that high school that did a kind of flashmob to support reading. I absolutely want to do a version of that at my school, for the same reason to support reading.

I'll continue to insert links to videos, articles, and blogs on all the people and projects mentioned above.