#11 - My Lesson Plan

This was yet another new and intimidating experience in this class.  Here's my first lesson plan, and I've gotta' say, it sounds a little crazy.  I mean this, this is a lot of stuff, and the whole way through I was thinking, "is this too much?  Are my kids going to able to handle this?  Am I going to be able to edit all of these in time?" At several times I had to remind myself that I, in fact, had no kids, and that these worries were all part of the learning process.  In another strange way, it was relieving.  When this semester started, I never thought about the realities of teaching, and now they keep creeping up on me.  At least now I know my head's getting in the right place.

Without further ado, my lesson plan for Homer's "Odyssey."

Description of the Unit

The lesson plan, designed for a 9^th Grade English Class, will revolve around Homer’s “The Odyssey.” The assignment will include individual reading, in-class reading and discussion, and written group analyses of different characters and settings within the epic poem.

Learning Objectives

This lesson is designed to familiarize the students with the world they will encounter in Homer’s epic tale.  While some students do come into 9^th Grade with an understanding of the myths and legends of Ancient Greece, for most, it is uncharted territory.  I believe that it is important to give the students a fair amount of foundation and background knowledge to support what they will be learning within the pages of the Odyssey.  The focus of this lesson is to increase their knowledge on the characters and settings in “The Odyssey,” which will be used to support the students as the reading goes on.

This lesson will begin with an introductory discussion of the story, and an overview of the events of “The Iliad,” which connect to “The Odyssey.” After this discussion, the students will be split up into their reading groups, which they will remain in for the remainder of our coverage of “The Odyssey.” Groups will be assigned to provide analyses of different characters, locations, events and themes throughout the course of their reading.  Their task will be to research on line and analyze their assigned character, etc., and upon the conclusion of the poem each member of the group will submit a 1^st draft report on their subject via a blog post.  These reports will be edited finalized and compiled into a Wiki to be posted on the class-page as a study guide to help when midterms and/or finals roll around.

Specific Curriculum Objectives

·      RL.9-10.1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text

·      RL.9-10.3. Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.

Use of Technology

Use of technology in this lesson will impact several areas of the assignment.  First and foremost is research.  With the exception of the book itself, the rest of the sources that the students use will be found by doing research online.  I will assist the students in their research when I can, however it will be up to them to determine how they find their information, and which sources are credible (8.1.8.A.5. – Select and use appropriate tools and digital resources to accomplish a variety of tasks and to solve problems).  The second application of technology in this assignment is the submission of their written assessments.  These will be submitted to me online in the form of a blog post, so as to accelerate the review process.  Since these are only first drafts, the final application of technology is for each student to post their final reports in the Wiki provided for them.

It must be noted that the purpose of technology in this assignment is not solely to expedite things, but also to ensure that the students are in constant contact with their groups and myself.  In a project like this, it is of the utmost importance that the students are never too far from assistance should they need it.

Timeline of the Assignment

While the groups will be assigned at the very beginning of the reading, this assignment will start once the reading has been completed.  From that day on the students will have two weeks to submit their finished work.

·      Day 1) The groups will draw their assigned subject at random.  After receiving their subject, the groups will decide amongst themselves who will be responsible for what.

o   Each group will receive any 2 of 8 potential characters

§  Characters – Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Athena, Poseidon, Circe, Agamemnon, or Achilles (I realize neither of them are in the story for very long but I think we can all agree that they’re integral to it).

o   Any 1 of 4 potential settings

§  Settings – Ithaca, Troy, The Isles of the Monsters, or The Underworld.

o   And 1 of 2 potential events or 1 of 2 potential themes

§  Events – The Trojan War or the Return to Ithaca

§  Themes – Perseverance or Cunning

·      Days 2 – 5) These days will be devoted to in-class research.  Students will be sure to utilize all of the resources available to help them best put in to words what impact their subject has on the story, as well as other individual elements of the story, such as other characters or events.  (i.e. – What impact did Athena have on Odysseus, Penelope, or the Trojan War itself.)

·      Days 6 – 9) Utilize these days to put together the first draft of your report.  It will be submitted on day 9.

·      Days 10 – 13) Over these days you will edit your first draft based on feedback from your group and myself.

·      Day 14) Submit your completed work for inclusion on the class’ Odyssey-Wiki.

Assessment

Throughout this assignment I will be monitoring the students based on both in-class participation and in-group participation.  It is important to me that each student puts forth his or her fair share.  However, it is important to realize that the main point of this assignment is not simply to test the students on their understanding of “The Odyssey,” but rather for them to use their new-found expertise to help them create something that will continue to help them down the road

The assignment will be considered a success based on how positively the objectives have been met, as well as the new-found comprehension the students have of a text and subject that were recently foreign to them.

#10 - Reckless Inexperience

Most of the blog responses that we've written so far have been simple.  This one isn't.  I know it probably hit home for a lot of you.  Not necessarily the specific subject of "sexting," but the broader issues of bullying, trust, and the ignorance of inexperience.  It wasn’t so long ago that we would have been in our own high school classes making our own mistakes.  This period of my life still hangs fresh in my mind, as it does for the rest of my classmates.  I read the class blogs and see how so many of them, mine included, reference their high school days with complete clarity.  Constantly calling back to happier times to share with the rest of us why they are here today.  Thanks to great teachers and great moments and great experiences, we now find ourselves embracing our new path.  But we know it wasn’t all great, a realization that’s probably all the more clear as we react to the tragedies of Hope and Jesse.

I sit here wanting to blame someone, wanting to find a bad guy.  It’s easy to blame the kids, and those to who put these girls through their last, torturous years deserve what they get, but that doesn’t solve the problem.  These girls could have been helped.  They suffered alone because of the unconscionable responses to one shortsighted mistake.  And it wasn’t just the kids.  The FFA, a club where Hope sought refuge, stripped her of her leadership status, the school, adults whom Hope had been told she could trust and seek out for guidance, suspended her, and her family, all of them looked to punish her first and foremost.  They heard about what she did and reacted as if they were dealing with someone who had not yet come to understand the consequences of her actions when, in fact, they were the ones in ignorance of the situation.  They, like her unthinking classmates, treated Hope like a “slut.”

Hope Witsell was a 13-year-old girl whose life had been destroyed with the push of a button, and I know things could have been different.  But how could things have been changed?  Once again all adults in the lives of these kids have to immediately push past the concept of taboo.  These are ignorant little people with access to technology that we could never dream of and a ridiculous amount of free time to come up with crazy stuff to do with it.  They need guidance and it has to come from all sides.  Teachers during the day, parents at night, kids have to know where the line is and, more importantly, why some can’t be crossed.  How do you get these messages across to selfish, shortsighted, ignorant, know-it-alls?  I have no idea.  I don’t know how you would be able to convince a girl that a guy that she trusts intimately may not be the man she thinks he is, nor do I have any idea how we’re supposed to get all sex-obsessed high school guys to not be jack asses.  Certainly not all kids are bad, but they are all inexperienced, and they are all prone to moments of weakness and lapses of judgment.  I don’t know how to fix everything, only that we all need to keep trying, learning, progressing and evolving, because this can’t happen again.

#9 - Fair Use

50%, I got 50 % on that quiz.  So I guess the first thing that it taught me is that I didn't know quite as much as I thought I did.  Still some, but not quite as much.

The first thing I should say on the subject is that the (not)Disney video they showed annoyed the heck out of me, clever though it may have been.  The second thing I have to say is that I do know the importance of these laws.  I've said before that I am a writer, by passion if not yet by profession.  And, as a writer I have a lever that I pull that opens up the booby-trapped path to the vault made of adamantium, which is guarded by six armed sentries, three tigers, and Cerberus himself, full of notebook after notebook of my creations (pretty standard for all writers, I assume).  My characters, my story ideas, my songs, my poems, everything that I've ever made since the point where I figured out the difference between "there," "their," and "they're" can be found within those pages, and not just the good stuff either.  The point is that those pages are worthless, and yet they mean more to me than anything in the world because I gave them existence, history, meaning, and life.  I would do anything to protect even the worst of my work because of what it represents to me, so you could imagine that I’m happy to know that my work is protected by the law… and my tigers!

That being said, I do completely understand and agree with the terms of fair use.  I agree with the freedom and flow of information, at least for those not seeking to profit illegally that is.  The law, as is stated in that annoying FBI notice you see before everything you watch, media is available, under certain strict terms, to be used “for the purposes of criticism, news reporting, teaching, and parody.” I can’t disagree with that.  Even though I’d love to be the Czar of my media forever and ever, the fact is that when you release what you create, it no longer belongs to you, not just to you anyway.  From that point forward, it belongs to the world.  I don’t want to imagine what things would be like if critics couldn’t show certain points of the work they were critiquing because the artist didn’t want a negative review, or a world without Spaceballs because Mr. Lucas decided he wanted to be a jerk about it.  As a teacher however, all of this means even more.  We are teaching our students about the world and we simply could not do that without having the entire world open to us.

#8 - The Story So Far

This was a bit more of an eye-opener than I thought it would be.  I chose to use the, Active learning example at the Infusion state, opting for the Shared Access as opposed to the 1-1which turned out to be a good thing since the video for the 1-1 example is currently down.

The concept was very simple, almost cute really.  It’s a bunch of kids putting together a magazine.  I laughed a little to myself thinking, “that’s adorable!  They’ll write about how hard math is, and about what’s on their Christmas lists.” That’s just about the point where they began to shut me up.  Yeah, there was nothing about teddy-bears in there, no “Twilight” or “Transformers” either, at least not that I saw.  It was, in fact, a magazine.  Neither infantile nor ground-breaking, just a magazine.  Strangely enough that turned out to be the genius of it.  This was an actual magazine with a sports section, movie and book reviews, the whole nine.  They each accepted roles within the hierarchy of their assignment, as either writers or editors, and saw to it that their magazine was created utilizing a scanner, the internet and simple production programs that came standard on their computers.   Even their teacher was amazed at how far her kids went when she took off the training-wheels and just let them run with it.  They even figured out how to get money for the magazine through advertisements.  

But the best part about everything that I saw was how they were handling the technology that they were presented with.  They saw the hardware and software for what they were, tools.  They weren’t intimidating, they were just what was used to get the job done.

I think it’s odd how often I take for granted just how much of technology I am so familiar with.  I was much more fluent than I thought I was at the start of this class, and I am doing even better now.  Calming down and just taking the time to learn these systems puts them in a different light that allows me to see things a bit more clearly.  That’s what makes the ideas put forth in the NETS and executed in the Technology Integration Matrix so important.  They’re introducing these technologies to their students at the right time and in the right way so that they’re familiar to them, even boring.  They’ll be more equipped to handle what’s out there and what will follow, even more than me.

#7 - A Podcast for Your Kids

Podcast Powered By Podbean

At least it's not another PowerPoint.  Not that I'm still looking to try to argue that PowerPoint is pointless, I already lost that battle, I just found it annoying.  This seemed a little simpler to me, even more accessible.  In my view this gives a voice to the lesson plans that we put out there.  We’ll wind up giving countless assignments to our kids, but we know just how confusing they can be.  How many times have you gone home and read through an assignment sheet only to be just as confused by the end?  Assuming it isn’t just me, I think we can all agree that any extra help provided is well worth having.  That’s something I see here, the potential for teachers to give more of their own support to a lesson.

This is some of the potential that I saw when choosing to utilize the poem from Khalil Gibran.  This poem means a lot to me, it spoke to me during times of need and loss, so much so that I volunteered to read it at my own Grandfather’s funeral.  And with any work that I’d come across in an English class, I’d like to know what works mean the most to my students.  Obviously, it doesn’t have to be a work like this.  It could be a dirty limerick for all I care.  But I’d like to know, in their own words, what a work means to them.  And maybe I’ll have them record a podcast of their own.  I’ve always thought that some works can have an even greater impact when their read aloud.

#6 Part 2 - Creativity in our Schools

First of all, I like this guy.  His ideas resonated pretty quickly with me, considering I only finished watching the video a few seconds ago, but hey, what can you do?  Sir Ken Robinson is a man that I knew nothing about before today, although I have since heard several of his ideas from other people that he has apparently had an influence on.  And now I have to say that I agree with everything the man said, and in all honesty, that might be because of how much it meant to me on a personal level.

I'm going to try to avoid total sentimentality in this entry (which is another thing that people say when they're about to do the exact thing they don't want to do), but my background wasn't all that different from that of Gillian Lynne, the dancer and choreographer that he mentioned in his address.  I never paid attention when I was younger, always doodling or making something up on the page where my notes should have been.  That's just who I was back then.  I know, that's not exactly unusual.  But, there was a point where all that changed.  I was lucky, and wound up in a high school where you were encouraged to follow up on areas of study that made you happy.  For me that was creative writing.  Whether it was poetry, short stories, song-writing, or whatever, it made no difference to me, it was something that I got great joy out of and developed a pretty good knack for.  I exhausted every creative writing class the school had to offer, and when there weren't any left to take I even tried my hand at journalism and composition just for the chance to create, and use my talent.

When I say that I was lucky, I mean it whole-heartedly.  I owe my entire identity to the teachers like Mr. Cahn, Ms. Milch, Mr. Niccolletti, Mrs. Franzino and others who helped me to find myself within my art.  And this didn't just help me in those classes, this made me a better student in general.  I wasn't a model pupil coming into high school, or even at the beginning of high school (or even now really).  I would just do what I could to get by, feeling too intimidated by certain subjects to think that I could do any better.  But after I discovered my talent, I became confident.  All the fear I felt from those other classes disappeared.  I mean think, about it, an essay?  I was writing songs, sonnets and sestinas in my spare time, essays seemed simple, basic, not scary.  Imagine what a great a feeling that is for a student.

It's amazing what a person can come up with once fear isn't hanging over their heads.  I know that every student deserves that relief, that weight that lifts off of your shoulders when you have confidence in yourself.  I'm not saying that it's the answer to everything, but I know it helps.  So yes, I certainly agree with Sir. Ken Robinson that creativity must be held in the highest regards in our schools.

#6 Part 1 - A Fad or the Key?

Wow, so much to digest.  Some of those articles just kept going didn't they?  And, now that I've had several sources telling me just how very wrong the others are, it's time for me to cast my vote for one side or the other.  Are the strategies put forth by 21st-Century movement going to be the salvation of our poor American school system, or are these false-prophets just wasting our time and we should start grabbing our torches and pitchforks?  Seems a little extreme, don't you think?


After reading all of the articles it's easy to see that there are very passionate (sometimes too passionate) arguments from both sides.  From the pros we hear something's clearly wrong, and this is the way to fix it.  The other side is just as sure of itself, but much more over-the-top.  Diane Ravitch and Daniel Willingham each echoed the sentiment that this program can't possibly work because it's putting the cart before the horse.  They feel that the 21st-Century techniques are only being used at the expense of traditional schooling, something that the new system simply cannot work without. "[O]ne cannot think critically," Ravitch says "without quite a lot of knowledge to think about." Obviously I'm not going to dispute that one needs a certain amount of knowhow before performing certain tasks, and sometimes that can't be learned as you go.


In my opinion, however, these guys are a little overreactive... ok, very overreactive.  Their contemporary, Jay Mathews, asked in his unfortunately titled article "The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills," "[h]ow are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?" Clearly you can see what I was saying about extremism, but this man is stating, quite emphatically, that "students [are] still struggling," and he's stubbornly pushing to go back to a way that has already been acknowledged as sub-par?  That just doesn't make sense.  Not once did Mr. Mathews or his colleagues address how the 21st-Century system could be improved, only that it wasn't showing enough positive results to make it worth the extra time and effort.  Really?  Already?  Every critical article here was written in 2009, a little early to be calling for triage.


Obviously we can't yet say that the 21st-Century system is a success just yet, but nor an we say with any certainty that it is a failure.  I certainly don't like everything about the 21st-Century Skills system of education.  I actually agree with these critics that many aspects of the application of 21st-Century Skills can leave teachers a little in the dark, and I don't really get that silly rainbow that they keep pushing on every page.  However, unlike Ravitch, Willingham, and Mathews, I do believe that this is more a reason to push forward than to pull back.  This was always going to be a slow process, a chance to the program along the way, based on its successes and failures.  The problems that these three have with the program are valid, but they are in no way causes for the abandonment of the entire movement, but rather calls for patience.  Whatever changes need to be made should be addressed before this system is left behind.  In his article "Flawed Assumptions Undergird the Program at the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills," Daniel Willingham himself admits himself that this program was always designed as an evolutionary process, that it was meant to change as it went along.  And that's the big pain when it comes to evolution, it takes time.


All three of them said in their articles that the skills and techniques at the heart of the 21st-Century movement were important skills for students to learn, but that they were "nothing new." Diane Ravitch referenced examples from 1911, 1916, 1920, and two of the three articles even referenced the educational importance of these skills during the time of Plato.  If we can agree that these skills and methods have always been seen as having some method, then shouldn't we also agree that they deserve further exploration?