Edmodo in the Classroom

When I started teaching full time in the classroom, I wanted to include technology in my lessons in some format. I use technology in many capacities, but I wanted to have online discussions. I chose to start an Edmodo account and post discussion questions on there and have my students go and post answers to these questions.

At first I worried about the response of the students to something like this, and then I realized I had nothing to worry about. My students loved this. They took to it like it was candy. They were eager to get on there and do work. I had to set limits early on to keep them from answer all the questions or carrying the discussion to far.

I will always have those students that will not participate in any activity I give them, but a lot of my 'trouble' students have thoroughly enjoyed the online discussion. It was a new avenue that I wanted to try and glad I did. It was brought a new vive to the classroom!

Where is the Line?

As everyone knows, or should know, the question about being Facebook friends with students is a touchy one. When it comes down to it, it should be known, as a rule of thumb, not to be Facebook friends with your students, even those that are pretty cool. But where is the line for regular friendships drawn?

In Mrs. Sandy's AP class, there is a kid named Evan who is one of the coolest kids I've ever met. Every day I think about how Evan is someone I would definitely have been friends with in high school. He is one of those kids that is adaptable to just about every different type of personality within the classroom. Especially in an AP class, where diversity can be, and often is, rampant, having the type of adaptable personality that Evan does is a great thing to have.

Just about every day, Evan greets me with "'Sup, Nolley" before heading to his seat. Generally that is all the conversation we have each day. On days where they are not having a regular lecture style class, such as when they are working on a paper and are, for example, peer editing or working with each other to attain different ideas, Evan will sometimes make his way over to my corner of the room so we can chat.

This is where I start wondering where the line is drawn. As much as I love talking to this student and picking his brain for different things (he is extremely intelligent and very witty), I often feel bad for talking to him too much because I do not want to distract him from his work, even though I know he will be alright in the end.

As the student teacher (especially as a male student teacher), however, I know that it can seem to be a very thin line between the teacher/student and friend/friend relationships, especially since we are fairly close in age to our students.

As a member of the Apple program at Lyon, Evan has told me about his extreme interest in the school and how much he would love to go there. I hope that he does end up going to Lyon because I know he would fit in there very well.

Hi, My Name is Drew, and I Am a Procrastinator ("Hi, Drew")

Beginning around junior high school, I became a pretty bad procrastinator. My college career has been no different. I have been putting things off until the last minute for four years, no matter how important these tasks may be. I would not wish this bad habit on anyone as it is a habit over which I have had multiple nervous breakdowns.

One thing alone that causes about 98% of my procrastination is (anybody?): Facebook. This might not come as a surprise to anyone, but Facebook is definitely the thing that brings me down and keeps me from getting my work done in a timely manner just about every night. Even as I sit on my bed writing this blog post, I look up and see a Chrome tab labeled "Facebook" sitting there glaring at me, waiting for me to succumb to its tempting powers (add Odyssey/sirens metaphor here).

Oftentimes, I get really, truly upset about how badly I procrastinate. When I get upset with myself about it, I lose any other interest I had in working on whatever I need to be working on. That leads me to Facebook even more often. Then I realize, once more, how much I am procrastinating and how badly I need to get back on task. It is almost literally a never ending cycle, and a very miserable one at that.

As I am in my senior year of college, I ask myself every day whether or not I will ever lose this bad habit, get my life together, and finish out the rest of this year well enough to leave with a decent GPA. I made it my goal at the beginning of this school year to make this year my best in my career at Lyon. So far, however, it has not been, and I know it is entirely my fault. When I ask myself this question everyday (whether or not I will dump procrastination and begin dating time management), I cannot help but fear for my career as a teacher. I have had a pretty tough time getting things going well in my class at Cave City. And this is only my internship. Yes, there is the fact that this is not MY class, and I cannot necessarily do everything I WANT to do with the students. And there is the fact that getting up in front of 23 students who are just a few years younger than me does not flow naturally through my mind. Getting in front of my classroom everyday gives me a new anxiety every day. But at the same time, I absolutely love my students. I honestly could not have asked for a better class to be with in my internship year. So when I really think about it, I know that what is causing me to have a tough time getting into my internship is procrastination and my lack of planning.

Although I have told myself repeatedly that I will work on my procrastination habits to get them out of my life, I know that it is not going to just happen cold turkey. I will REALLY have to work on it, because I know that I will not be a great teacher if I am a procrastinator; it will ruin my career. I want to get it taken care of now so that, by my second or third year of teaching, I will always be on task and always have things completed on time. The main reason I want this habit to change is for my future students. Number 1, I do not want them (or their grades) to suffer in my classes because I am not on time with things. Secondly, I want to be a good role model for my students by showing them that timeliness is everything, and that procrastination is a habit that can ruin almost anything. I do not ever want to see my students procrastinating as well as I do, because I know the outcomes, and they are not pretty.

Dylan, Lennon, Mayer: Change (Or the Lack Thereof) Throughout the Decades

Tomorrow, October 15, 2013, I will be giving my 10th graders a lesson about songs that discuss the need for change in the world. This is the first lesson I have been able to really come up with on my own, so I am pretty excited about it.

As I stated in our first class meeting during the appositive exercise, I am a rather passionate liberal, especially when it comes to social issues. This is part of the reason this lesson caught my eye as I was perusing the internet trying to come up with something. This website contained a detailed script of how to deliver this lesson, and the more I looked at it the more interested I was becoming in the idea. The script gave several examples of songs to use in the lesson, but I picked the three I was most familiar with: "Blowin' in the Wind," by Bob Dylan; "Imagine," by John Lennon; and "Waiting On the World to Change," by John Mayer. These three songs, representing three different decades, appealed to me the most because, not only do they have similar messages, but also because, in representing these three different decades, they show that our country has had many of the same issues for years and years.

I had been wanting to come up with a lesson about The Beatles, but this website grabbed me faster than any others that included The Beatles. Although the Fab Four's music changed dramatically with the decades, that idea was not quite as strong as the idea that there have been several events within our country that have remained consistent over the decades.

In this lesson, I am going to play each song on YouTube for the class, so they can listen while watching the singer's emotions during the video. I will have printed off lyrics for each of these songs, so after viewing the video and listening to the song, I will lead discussion over each of the songs. I will then have the students (probably) get into groups and thoroughly annotate the lyrics. Finally, I will evaluate the lesson by providing a song analysis worksheet to each of the students. This worksheet asks questions pertaining to each song, but I think I am going to have them pick just one of the songs to analyze.

As you might be able to tell from my last post ("Dead Poets Society, etc"), I am very interested in using different forms of entertainment media within my lessons. As I stated in the last post, I love just about nothing more than movies. Music is a close second. There is just so many layers in music (and movies) that it is hard to ignore, especially when teaching English.

The Whole Spectrum

One of my philosophies of teaching is to never stop learning myself, and to always bring aspects of life I find meaningful and beautiful into my classes. One of the aspects of human nature and learning that has always fascinated me is the concept of multiple intelligences. As someone with high Existential intelligence, this would make sense, right? I love to learn how people think, and step into their points of view. I think this tactic also translates very well into the classroom, and I think teachers would spend less time worrying about lesson plans and Common Core standards if they really focused on their students!

In class last week, I introduced the theme of "Focus" for October and gave each student a multiple intelligence survey. I was happy to find that most of the students seemed to really enjoy this activity and were interested in learning about themselves. After the students completed the survey and found their categories of highest intelligence, I wrote each of their names on the board underneath the different categories so the whole class could see the distribution of people's talents. There were a large number of kinesthetic learners in each class, which did not surprise me, and many students also scored highest in Intrapersonal intelligence, meaning that they have to motivate themselves with the right attitude for learning before they can truly take anything to heart. Even though we had classes weighted this way, I emphasized that as teachers, we can't ignore an area of intelligence simply because only one or two students fall into that category. We have to find ways to reach the students using all of these intelligences to best fit our subject. Going along with that, I noticed that there were only one or two verbal learners out of the four classes I gave the survey to, indicating that I will need to teach English in ways other than just reading and taking notes!

I think all teachers should take just a few minutes of a class period to give their students surveys like this. The students will understand that we as teachers really care about them, and they might change their perception of school as a "jail" or other unpleasant place if they sense this care and devotion to teaching. They also might figure out valuable information about themselves that they weren't even sure of before.

Dead Poets Society, etc.

If there is anything I love more than life itself it is a good movie. I have a large collection of movies that I add to whenever I possibly can. Every time I go on a trip, I bring at least five movies on the off chance that there will be a DVD player wherever I am staying. If I'm going anywhere for more than a week, I will bring most, if not all, of my collection. My roommate (also a huge movie buff) and I quote movies to each other at least three times each day. Needless to say, movies are my favorite.

One of the things I look forward to doing as a teacher is showing movies in my classroom. Obviously, I will show movies primarily when necessary, but, if I ever have some free time, I will show my students a movie as a reward or something.

Some of my favorite movies are, in fact, ones that depict a teacher/student scenario. Of this genre, my all-time favorite is Dead Poets Society. Apart from the fact that Robin Williams being one of my top five favorite actors, this movie has so many layers within it that make it an education-genre masterpiece. Mr. John Keating (Robin Williams) comes into an all-boys prep school as a first year teacher. As an English teacher, Mr. Keating develops a relationship with a select group of boys in one of his classes using his very unorthodox teaching styles. He introduces the group of boys to the idea that they can be and do anything they want. He gets them involved in a group he was in when he went to the school called the Dead Poets Society. One thing leads to another and the boys get in trouble. What they take from the Year of Keating, though, is more than they could ask for.

In my Practicum class last year, I taught a lesson about Walt Whitman, a central figure and idol to John Keating in DPS. For this lesson, I showed a clip from the movie in which Keating goes on and on about Whitman. Whitman is the primary motivation in Keating's "Be who you want" teaching style. This part of my lesson really pulled the students in because even a three minute clip from this movie can gain one's attention in an instant. After showing this clip (which revolved around a section of a Whitman poem I discussed that day), the lesson was so much easier to get through, as my students were eager to answer questions.

In the future, seeing as how we have more to do in the classroom than time allows us, I know that I will not be able to show movies often. There are certain movies, however, that will be a must-show, especially after reading the book that inspired the movie. One must-show is To Kill A Mockingbird, a great movie that gives a visual to one of the greatest books ever written. Over time, I hope to collect more movies that were books first, so I can have a greater variety of options to make into lesson units. I know that it's a long stretch, but I hope that someday there comes a standard that involves movies. I will then be in Heaven.

Project-Based Learning

The classroom needs to be fun and exciting to the students. I always felt that this needed to be, but I could not figure out a way to make this happen without something horrible happening. Project-based learning had been talked about in my classes, but to see this in action was something new for me--and I liked it!

Our students had to do a project (skit) that required them to incorporate all of the material (articles, speeches, poems, etc.) in their dialogue. They had to show that they mastered the material and understood how that material worked with the essential questions.

I had my doubts about this. I could not believe that my students would work on this and actually complete the assignment while incorporating the needed information. To my amazement, my students proved me wrong. Each group worked extremely hard and very few groups fell short of the mark we had placed. Every group addressed the unit's material, some not as fully as others.

This really inspired me to try to incorporate project-based learning in my classroom. It never hurts to let the students have fun with the classroom material and actually learn the stuff!