Excellence

8th graders are finishing up their trial of the US government for possible genocide and violations of the UN Declarations of the rights of indigenous people. Students are doing excellent jobs of creating argument founded in sources, usually primary sources, and the supreme court members are citing the type of argument they hear(logos, pathos, ethos) and are cutting out any non-logic based argument.

7th Grader will begin their essays on the efficacy and morality of enhanced interrogation. The prompt will simply be to take a stance on the torture issue and write a persuasive essay. This activity will require defining the line between enhanced interrogation and torture, citing primary sources and then developing a stance on the subject.

11th Grade is completing their study of river valley civilizations on monday and will be assessed over the break. They will construct compare and contrast(most effective practice) essays and then will move on to debating philosophical questions from around the world after the turn of the first millennium BC.

Return from the grave

The blog is back! Thanks blogger app for the iPhone! Should make managing things on here much much easier...

This school year is going well and the students are really opening up academically and socially... I don't feel like I am as good as I was last year... Let me rephrase-- I keep needing to refocus back to fundamentals and keep myself away from much else.

Having 170 students is taking it's toll, especially because they are in three classes; at the same time it's a fabulous opportunity to have an impact. I just wish data came out more frequently so I would how we measure compared to others.

Teach THROUGH the Test

When I was in high school I was lucky enough to be a part of a state championship track & field team. As the end of our dual meet season came and we prepared for our local conference meet, our coach told us we were going to train through it. In other words we continued to condition very hard and work to improve rather than making the conference meet our goal. The idea was founded in the principle that our performance at the conference meet was not nearly as important as the district and state meets that came later on.

Segue to testing.

Testing must be treated the same way as this conference meet. Currently I have students taking exams and am actively attempting to use this exam as a tool to continue to teach information and skills to those who have not yet mastered them. I can say that out of 90 students I have 3 who I believe are not at the level I would consider proficient and would therefore fail the exam. Rather than allow this, these students will need to use this time to relearn(or learn) the material. It is simply unacceptable to me that students could attempt to leave my class with little or no understanding of ancient history, with limited ability to create arguments or minimal ability to analyze and evaluate using high quality secondary and/or primary sources. With these goals in mind I design my assessments to be a further teaching tool.

In FOCUS by Mike Schmoker I read that OSU's physics dept uses buzzers to formatively assess student learning and they immediately alter instruction to match their results. I do this by having students write responses to in class questions. I do not use percentages to the same extreme but I do immediately clear up student misconceptions. I try to hold the standard to 100% though because if i let any student leave without understanding then I will ultimately fail them. Exams at the end of units can also be this type of teaching tool, if you see a student struggling to write an essay, help, then have them re-write! Why not use this as a summative data-set to improve remedial instruction?

The next question is, how does this alter the meaning of grades?

Panel Discussions

Today we are doing panel discussions regarding the way we view Greeks in history. The debate centers around whether we should see their contributions as positive, negative or something else entirely. Students have produced the best discussion, showed tremendous motivation and are absolutely making this the finest day of my career. They have incorporated contemporary history, current events, philosophy, morality and life lessons into their discussions. IT IS UNBELIEVABLE!!!

What a day

What a meaningful day, as I shared with students, I heard back from an author who has shaped quite a bit of what I do as a teacher, I saw fantastic work coming from my 7th graders extended essays AND was treated to some fantastic debate over the stability of the Athenian and Spartan states. All in all the streak continues as I continue to have the best and most meaningful days of my career! I cant wait for tomorrow's debates, final revisions of our collapsing government essays in geography and of course for Wednesday (Don't forget) and our 6:40 AM morning meeting to discuss our enrichment journal that Dr. Fleck and Hanssen sent us! Listen folks, I need you to understand how special what you are doing is... you have 3 college professors recognizing your work in class right now, not many 17 year olds put in that kind of work! From here, we need to work harder to solidify our fundamentals and polish up our language while continuing to just have fun with academics...

Side note, I am working on getting patches or wristbands for our movement... FREE YOUR INNER NERD!!!

I AM TIRED... SICK AND TIRED!

I have grown completely and utterly sick of hearing about a decline in academic standards and student work... that overused, over-abused and utterly false statement is something I simply cannot tolerate anymore. I just got sent e-mail to the author of the Concord Review to see if some of my students work could be published in his journal. I like the fact that the review is dedicated to students producing high level academic work and I really value his contribution to academics (clearly a BUT is coming); at the same time, on his blog he references a the "decline" in student work. Educators since Socrates have made this claim. I cannot speak to the reality of these words in any other classroom or at any other period in history but I can say that my students do more work at a much, much, much (muchness anyone) higher level than I EVER did in high school and quite frankly at many times in college. I can say that half the courses I took in college had required reading (but did not require that you read it), had one major written work (if you can call 5 pages major) and gave two to three tests based entirely on notes from lecture. These tests were the most academically challenging, as they required on the spot generation of blue book essays. Rarely was I presented with reviewed, academic journal articles or primary sources outside of those I used independently for term papers. Now, I had a great college experience and am by no means complaining; as difficulty goes, my college experience was far more academically challenging and engaging than my high school experience. I graduated a mere (can I still say mere 10 years later?) DECADE ago and can say with certainty that my students work harder, are more motivated and possess greater skills than I ever did. I have gone back and looked at high school writing that I produced via emails from my parents and you know what? My students are doing more and they are doing it better. I recall writing one or two three page, five paragraph papers in all of high school; I wrote one as a junior and one as a senior and only in English class. (How dare I write in History!) Our students are better than we were, do they need to get better? Yes. Do they need pushed to do so? Yes. Do they need encouragement to make it? Yes. But they are not falling behind, they are in the lead and as far as I can see, they are pulling away from the pack.

Extra sessions

I just decided in the past week to finally begin offering a extra sessions of my world history course for juniors before school. On Monday mornings we will be doing a more fun oriented set of projects focused on getting anyone behind caught up and giving motivation and further, less academic more "just for fun" type activities for those who just want to do the work. Right now we are working on lyrics for re-worded songs made to cover the history we have gone through in class. On Wednesdays we will be doing high level enrichment-- we will be focusing on a variety of reviewed scholarly journal articles. currently there are about 20 students signed up for the monday reviews and 30 signed up for wednesdays... If everyone shows that will require setting up a different room for the classes or multiple sessions. I cant wait to get this started. At this point, we can squeeze in an extra 24 full hrs of instruction before the end of the year.

Article reading

Students are currently reading an article put out by Montana State University's Department of Economics. The ARTICLE attempts to convey a cause and effect relationship between landforms, available crop production and levels of democracy. I see students sitting in a classroom in January taking on something written for an audience with reading skills and historical and economic awareness far beyond their own. This shows a level of motivation I could only dream of! So far 100% of students are taking it on and they are experiencing different levels of success. My developing readers are reading to pick out descriptions of Sparta and Athens. My proficient readers are trying to pick out how exactly the relationship between agriculture and government system occurs and my advanced readers are reading it from the economics standpoint can you understand the factors that drive this formula. I am quite happy with the way things are going.

Why I am not a deadline guy...

I hear quite often from teachers about how students just don't get their homework done. I completely agree with them. I think my homework is ridiculous - I mean, think about it, once or twice a week I ask them to do writings at home that go for a couple pages and must take quite a few of them two hours to get written. When they come back I would say that overnight homework assignments have a 50-70% completion rate. Today the over the holiday assignment is due and I believe it is pulling about a 60% completion rate. I will collect most of the leftovers tomorrow and will have to put in some serious legwork running down the last 3-4 of them over the next week.

Now, I am a monster for common ground. I completely understand and fully appreciate the views of colleagues who would argue that I make a bad problem worse. However, I also recognize the importance of getting work done. You see, students are kids, the ones I deal with are adolescents, and the nagging thing about adolescents is they are notorious for not being long term and big picture thinkers. They invariable will lack discipline on some level and have this tendency to do things that are contrary to their own self-interest. They have some growing up to do... literally! I guess I am just a believer that they will make mistakes and have to. Now, is that an excuse to not do work? NO! What I mean is that they will take zeros to avoid work. My system at least results in EVERYONE having to do the work. Is it flawed? Yes.

Why else Mr. Warner?

How about this one... 42.8% of our students qualify for free/reduced lunch. That means a strikingly high number of students are living in some form of poverty. If I were to list traits of people in poverty it would once again point to the tendency to not get work done when there are other forms of instant gratification available. As my father says, "It shows a lack of self-discipline." He is right. I need to work in their game because what we are doing is important. They need to do the work I assign because it is important... what is the alternative? Not doing it at all? Okay, then I give you a bad grade and you still don’t get it done. You perform worse on the exam, don't build any skills and perform worse on state testing... Clearly a recipe for success! How about your teacher chases you down and you do the work and yeah, it’s late, BUT it requires you to think critically, problem solve and learn. Now the exam comes and you do a little better.

I look at teaching like throwing a ladder down so someone can climb a tree. The ladder doesn’t start from the ground, you need to start from the top and work to the student. I build my goals first and then design my exam for the unit first. What goes on the test is what I want to be able to guarantee my students know. Then, I build assignments that fit the skills and knowledge necessary to pass the exam. Following this, lessons come out- the purpose of each lesson is to ensure students possess skills and knowledge to accomplish the assignments, which tier them to success on the exam. Am I teaching to my test? YES! I should be because the test matches my big ideas, state standards and my unit goals.

So… Is my class easy? I hope so… If you put in the legwork by doing the work right and doing it well, then you should learn. That is, if I am qualified to do my job… and I certainly hope I am.