Praxis of Pedagogy Day 25

Today was the day that students could work on their final projects. I went around checking students' progress and it was 70/30. 70 being the percentage that didn't have shit. It was good though to have the day so that I could yell/encourage them.

So I've been having some problems with this one student in my class. She's a good girl, but very very unhappy for various reasons that when I heard them I understood. If I had the shit in my life now that she does at her age... I'd be pretty unhappy too. Anyways, students were supposed to be working on their projects and I was wandering around working with different students. She was sitting on a computer with one window doing an online community thing and in another window she had stuff on her project that she was doing. I knew that she wasn't doing the project work cause when I was away she was typing loudly and furiously but when I got closer the typing would go silent and she would be doing work... I hate it when they think I'm stupid. I don't know the minimizing trick??? I've been doing that since they were in elementary school!!! Anyways, I left the room to check on students in the computer lab and when I came back I ran into the room and caught her at the computer in the midst of minimizing. I yelled "HAHA!! I caught you. You are so not slick!!!"" Everyone around her including her laughed. They were surprised that I ran in. After that for the rest of the class she did her work. I didn't take any points off of her contract cause she did work for the rest of the period. It was a good humanizing experience for us though. We hadn't been getting along and this I think helped break some tension.

Then in my 2nd period class a fuse blew. All 3 crappy computers in the back of my class went out. The computers sucked but at least they had internet access. Now I got one computer that works and has internet access...ghetto-ass. This is a fucking ridiculous situation. I had to send students to other classes and a lot of those classes didn't have many working computers. I'm going to fix this computer situation cause I can't stand it. I'm going to get the school on easy grade pro and try to get school administration software going. I can't work in such a crappy computer situation.

I realized after the first two classes that most kids had no idea how to research. I should have realized this. So in my 3rd period I gave an impromptu lesson on the steps to researching. The steps I laid out were

1. Encyclopedia. Look shit up in an encyclopedia to give you some general knowledge on a subject.
2. Key Words list Make a list of key words so that if you need to do searches on internet.
3. Library/Internet search Find books and do searches with the key words
4. Find 1 good book and check out its bibliography Then you can use that bibliography to find other books and check out that bibliography. Repeat that step and you've got a lot of sources
5. Notecards Keep notecards with quotes, book title, and page numbers
6. Make an outline Figure out where notecards will go and the outline is the skeleton of the writing. After that is made then 80% of your work is done. Now it's just a matter of expounding.
7. Comment on quotes Ok so this isn't really part of the research but is more part of the writing the paper part. But the whole idea is that students just throw quotes in and never really comment on them. They can fill more space and make their paper waaay better if they just comment on quotes.
8. Spellcheck, read aloud, edit 21st fricking century and kids don't spellcheck. REEEdiculous. They also never read their own work aloud and because of that their writing sounds stilted and bad. I also told them to get someone else to read their work.
9. Rewrite Final Pretty much self-explanatory

After this I had them do work in various classes or make up outlines and stuff.