Pedagogy and Praxis Day 2

Today was journal write day...

For my Asian American studies class I told a Daoist tale which showed that sometimes bad can come from good and good from bad. Then for the journal prompt I gave:

Think about an event in your life that seemed bad but turned out to be good. Maybe you got injured and while you were healing up you learned how to use a computer. What makes the event change from bad to good may be something that you learned as a result, something that you did differently as a result or something taht happened that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. Tell the story of the even taht you experienced and help your readers understand how an event taht seemed negative turned out to have valuable consequences.

For the most part this prompt didn't turn out well. People thought it was too hard to think up something and the stuff that I got back was short and not as good as I know they are capable of.
After that we finally finished up "Streets of Gold" by Curtis Chang. Oh yeah...Let me just say that popsicle sticks are gold!!! I ask review questions constantly with them and then pull the sticks and find out where people are at in their studies. This is an excellent way of checking learning and calling people out for greater accountability. After that I did the L part of the KWL (what did you learn). Once again I called on people using the sticks and when they didn't give me anything I took a point off of their contract. Accountability. Class ended with us still doing the KWL and I will have to finish it up on Thursday. I think one of my biggest problems is figuring out how long things will take. I don't have a very good sense of time on projects. Usually I think that things will take less time than they actually do. But I would rather do a few things well than a whole lot of things not so well.

For my US History class the journal prompt was a quotation from Confucius. I felt like a bad fortune cookie using it even though it is a great quote. My dad loves to quote Confucius so I am sure he would approve. The quotation was:

Learning without thinking is labor lost; thinking without learning is perilous. -Confucius

After explaining what the word perilous meant (All I can think of the whole time was Monty Python and the Holy Grail), I had the students explain what the quotation meant. do they agree with it? Why or why not? Give some real life examples that agree or disagree with the quotation. This one actually turned out a lot better than the 1st period writing prompt and I got more writing from people. Perhaps quotation would be better to use as writing prompts. I'll have to experiment with it in other classes to see. Using this quotation I introed into the idea of using strategies to improve study skills. I handed out 5 notecards and students came up with 5 questions about the reading "War is a racket". Then we did the L part of the KWL on war with me using the sticks again. We ended on this.

In my multicultural ed class we had finished yesterday watching "Real women have curves" and one of the themes in the movie was the parents holding the main character back from going to college. My prompt was:

Think about a time when you felt like your parents were holding you back from doing better. What was the situation? If your parents don't hold you back, then perhaps you hold yourself back. Think about a time when you were holding yourself back from doing better.

After this I worked on a semantic map with them involving themes in the movie. I wanted to introduce the idea of semantic mapping to them for future use. This actually went pretty well and I wanted them to get used to making semantic maps so that we could use them for other things later. This map would be a template for other maps. But then I tried to go into the next assignment and this is when I started losing people. As I said before, this class is young, hormonal, and post lunch. They kept trying to get me off track and were generally uncooperative. Of course I took this out on their contracts and handed out hours of detention to the main culprits. It just bothers me that everything takes twice as long as it should with this class and that the students with less self-control mess things up for the others. So the assignment that I was supposed to do in class I handed out as homework and will penalize students on their contracts for not turning it in. I have to be harsher on the contracts because the last time I assigned homework 4 people turned it in.