My answers: great, no, yes, YES!, probably, terribly, thrilling, themes. More detail to come. How about you? How’s it going?Similar Posts:

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Speech

Awesome. I stumbled on the idea of splitting my Plane Trouble exercise across two days. The first day, students complete their individual rankings. The second day is when they work in groups. This is going to make the discussion much more interesting since time will pass and I’ll be able to make sure everyone has their list finished before they jump into groups. Last year, a lot of students didn’t finish on their own before they started the group discussion. Also, the Partner Presentations split across two days. Interview and a little bit of planning one day, regroup and present another day. This (hopefully) forces them to write a bit more down because they’ll need to recall details a full day later. Also, the passage of time usually encourages a better product because they have to review details.

To Do: Count the cards out ahead of time. I use cards to create groups and I had to sort them while stalling for time. If that’s the worst mistake I make all year, though, I’ll be happy. Still, it was a stupid thing to do and it’s all these little things that add up.

English 1 Support

“Oh yeah… Only your own writing is allowed on the People Hunt page.”

They would find people and then simply pass their paper to that person to write the name down. For the first few minutes, no one was meeting anyone other than, “Can you…,” “Yeah, sure…” [moves on to next person]. I tried to fix that fairly quickly, but most students kept passing their papers over for someone else to write their name on it. But I like this activity because it provides a specific task for shy or hesitant students: all you need to do is find the one person who saw both Iron Man and The Dark Knight, so that’s only one question you focus on asking everyone in the room; once you find that person, come back to me and I’ll tell you to find another one. That’s manageable.

I want to keep these kids talking to each other (in complete sentences) as much as possible. I also want to read aloud to them as much as possible, so I’m thinking of something they can do with a short bit of reading each day. Right now, I’m thinking of a different writing task each day I read. Summarize, predict, evaluate, connect, and imitate exercises with a specific format to follow sound good.

To Do: This is a batch of kids where I wholeheartedly accept the claim that there is a teacher gap. Teachers failed these students along the way because our system isn’t set up to work with students who don’t come to the table ready to be in school. I need to be the teacher they need much more than my other classes (who also need that, but have learned to adapt to the way school and the world works; these students have not).

English 3

Great! I managed to end each period with “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” fading out as the bell rang and I said, “See you tomorrow! We’ll do another song and talk about zombies!” That was a nice ending. That also means we only got to that single song today. I took time to walk through what I want them to do with the song (summary, significance, tone, genre) so that tomorrow will run smoothly when they are on their own and have to do this again. For the most part (except where it would become tedious and overbearing), I pushed students to use lines from the song to defend their ideas.

To Do: I need to pick songs that have a clearer narrative, though. The summary of today’s song was a bit rocky and scattered, more like a list of facts than a linear recollection of the story told. That’s not to diminish what we did today, which was to use text to justify our opinions and interpretations. I could have planned the graphic organizer portion a bit better. They folded the paper to make four boxes. The back of the paper was blank so that became our space to write in summary, significance, tone, and genre (predicted style of the song). To be fair, though, this was something that hit me on the way to work this morning. I also need to solidify my zombie texts. Which ones do I copy?

Handouts

Here are the papers I put into their hands today:

• Speech
  • Anecdote – Speech #1
  • Plane Trouble
• English 1 Support
  • People Hunt
  • Partner Presentations
• English 3
  • Songs

Similar Posts:

• Day One
• Skit Speech
• How Was It For You?
• What A Mess?
• Treats

Seriously, consider ditching that dry bit of talk. Push it off as much as you possibly can. The students only need to know certain things right now and chances are that info isn’t on your syllabus. It can wait until later. For now, you have a stage to set and what you do today will impact the rest of the school year. Not irreversibly, but this is important stuff.

Day One for me:

Speech (Period 2)

Breathe And Scan: Everyone comes up to the front of the room, breathes in and out, turns their head to scan the entire audience, says first and last name while still breathing steadily, scans the audience one more time, and takes a seat.

Partner Presentations: You have a total of ten minutes to find out as much about each other as you possibly can. Person A, you are the person who woke up earliest. Person A, you need to find out about Person B in the next five minutes. Person A, the only things you can say in the next five are questions. Teachers: when five minutes are over, switch roles. Give them two minutes to piece together a presentation about each other and then start.

Anecdote – Speech #1: Never too early to start the first assignment! Since I have audio of last year’s students giving their speeches, I’ll pick a few to have the class listen to and evaluate. These speeches will begin next Wednesday.

Plane Trouble: Using the opening minutes from the pilot of Lost, I set up the situation that people crash landed on an island. On their own, they have a list of possessions that they rank in terms of importance for survival. They then rank those items again in a small group. The written piece at the end of this is all about how they decided the order on their own compared to how it was decided in the small group. This is the first in a series of small group discussion activities that culminate with a group speech.

English 1 Support (Period 4)

People Hunt: Taking yet more ideas from Dan, specifically some things he posted on the firstday wiki, we’ll start off with a chance to walk around the room and talk to each other. “Find someone who…” and you can imagine the rest of the page. Part of what I want here is to encourage confidence and fluency in these students. That’s going to be a huge part of this course and helping them succeed in their English 1 class.

Partner Presentations: Similar to Speech but more structured, we’ll have a set list of five questions to answer. Each pair will also create one question of their own. When presenting each other in front of the class, I’ll have a series of sentence starters that they will use (My colleague’s name is…, When not busy with other things, s/he likes to…, I found out that [name] was born in [location], etc.) to encourage not only complete sentences, but variety in sentence structure.

Who I Am: I slightly modified this handout (PDF) and students will begin to work on filling in details about themselves. This is again a confidence builder and an insight into their writing competency. These will result in a paragraph and presentation on Friday.

English 3 (Periods 5-7)

Songs: Again from the firstday wiki through the mind of Damian and something I did last year, I’ll be playing two songs for students: “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” by Black Kids and “The Geeks Were Right” by The Faint (I will not be showing those videos, just playing the songs). My twist on it this year, though, is that we’ll read the lyrics before listening to the songs in order to start getting at inferential thinking. We’ll summarize the story, learn about the speaker of both songs, find some kind of theme, then move to discussion about the type of song it will be. After hearing the song, we’ll see if that impacts our understanding of it. I’m banking on most students not having heard of these songs or these bands. Let’s see how that goes.

Zombies: Impersonating a zombie says a lot about interpretation of character. We’ll engage in that during the closing minutes of class. In groups of four, students will impersonate zombies for each other given certain scenarios I call out: you’ve been a zombie for a long time, you’re a brand new zombie and don’t quite know what to do, you used to be the President before you became a zombie, you were on your way to the mall when you became a zombie. Closing discussion will have us talking about how the scenarios impacted our characterization of zombies and the common aspects in all of our impersonations. Surely a segment from Shaun of the Dead will find its way into class. Excerpts from World War Z and Zombie Preparedness Initiative will become models for what we write this week, as well as entry into reading nonfiction.

What does your agenda look like?Similar Posts:

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Some Questions

What went well? Did you do anything this year that you keep telling yourself you should do?

Working with songs in English 3 gave a nice way to start discussing how to use text to prove a point. I think it interested some kids and I heard a lot of voices from most classes. We’ll revisit that work tomorrow and discuss the contrasting tone of each of the two songs we worked with. This means we dealt with rudimentary literary interpretation on the first day and I always tell myself to dive right in from day one. We worked right up to the bell and I’m happy about that.

Did you start off with the right tone? Is there anything you’re not happy with? Did you do that thing again that you keep telling yourself not to do?

Speech went terribly. I do a breathe and scan exercise that just about everyone delivered a lackluster performance on. A lot of students in the class do not appear willing to even give things a good try, but that could have just been because it was an 8:13 class on the first day of school. Their first speech is in their hands right now. We’ll get into the communication model tomorrow and I’m planning a slide show to make that a touch more interesting. I still hold hope. And if I can manage to punch holes in handouts before class, I won’t waste time doing it during our short time together. That cost me dearly in sixth period today.

How are your classes looking, just from your brief introduction?

My Speech students strike me as hesitant to do any work, while my English 3s seem chomping at the bit. Speech was the quietest all day, ironically enough. At my school, Speech and Creative Writing are full of seniors who need English credit, not students who elected to be in the course out of personal interest. They are good kids, but by definition they have had trouble with school somewhere in the past and it is often chronic. That said, I really do feel positive overall.

A Short-Term Goal

No conflicts the first week. No matter what, no negative interaction. Find a way to smile at the insult and make students feel like there’s nothing they can do to upset you. Those kids who sit in the back all period and watch the clock? Smile at them. Let them know that there is business to take care of. Get their attention, smile at them, then mime that they should be writing/reading/thinking/talking, but don’t bring the hammer down. Yet. And when you do, do it in private before class or after class. “I need you involved in this class and working on the assignments I give you, not watching the clock. What can we do to make this happen? What can I do to help you be successful here?”

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