Wacky Wednesday

I'm going to have a heck of a lot of grading to do this weekend. I've gone through about two reams of paper for this week's assignments and it's only Wednesday. My students are in the process of revising their papers, and instead of dealing with forgetful students and a lack of resources (which was the norm last year), I set up stations and set in motion enough back-up plans that not even Mr. Magoo could mess up.

Last year, my students spent 9 weeks learning about Personal Narratives, writing 3 rough drafts, and taking one of those through the revision process to the final paper. First off, 9 weeks is WAY too long to work on Personal Narratives, and secondly, I had about 40-50% of the students misplace or just simply not start or finish a single one of the three rough drafts. This made editing incredibly hard, which threw me out of whack, stressed me out, and lead to failing grades.

This year, I cut the unit down to 6 weeks, and the paper segment down to about 3 and a half, which on the block schedule amounts to about 6-8 days spent working on the paper in some capacity while also reading and learning about other English techniques and strategies to add to their drafts.

This week is being spent on "Stations" as my students break off into groups of 4-6 and work on peer-editing, finding $10 words in the thesaurus and through group discussion to replace commonplace phrases, introducing the new novel, and typing on one of 5 working computers in the classroom (one of those 5 is my teacher computer). I made sure that every student who typed up their story in the library lab saved it so I could come around with a USB drive and like a magic computer fairy collect every single story and copy it to all of the computers in my own classroom. I've completed this update process every day since last week so that no student has problems getting their most updated copy.

For the more tech savvy, you might be asking why I didn't just network a drive and have all the students save to that harddrive. Well, that would just be to easy, wouldn't it? Due to admin restrictions, three of the five computers wouldn't be able to write to the drive unless someone from Technology comes by and sets it up with an admin key. One other computer is currently not hooked up correctly to the school network and as such has allowed me admin privileges and the ability to install and use programs that are quite useful and vital to my class and afterschool clubs. Technically, I'm supposed to remind technology that they should hook up this computer and remove the admin privileges, but it's the only real leverage I have over the other three student workstations (two of which are riddled with viruses, and I can't even update virus scan without admin access). Also, I can't just host the stories on a web server as the students don't have internet access keys yet, and if they closed the window for any reason, I would have to go over and type in my user passcode again. Not exactly time efficient for a teacher.

Aside from making sure a digital copy of each piece of student work was made available on all machines, I also took a stack of paper to the library with my USB drive and printed out a copy of EVERY SINGLE STUDENTS' paper. This was indeed a wasteful act for the 11 children that did not misplace their latest copy of their paper or had printed it at home. For the rest, it saved me a great deal of whining, complaining, and lost time. My students worked, worked, and worked some more, and it was worth it. So they're in 9th grade, and I shouldn't baby them. I get that, I really do. I just don't think I should be so foolish as to think that they are all ready to be relied on as adults. This week... I was right.

Visual Media Club
I love this part of my job. Only 5 students could show up today, but we filmed part 1 of a two part homage to Ronin by creating a short scene with a clarinet case (briefcase) and a laptop bag. The students were excited, energetic, and most stayed until 5:30 just to see what they filmed. We're also going to be featured in the school newspaper.

Crazy Kids
During stations today, a group of students proposed a hypothetical situation: If I were a philosophy teacher and gave the students a journal assignment asking the question "why?", would I give a student a 100% if they wrote "why not?". After a confused look on my face and a few questions later, I told the students "sure". I still don't know where that one came from, but at least I got a "cool" sticker out of it, and they hurried back to work afterwards.