The Praxis of Pedagogy Day 48

Friday was a good day. In all of my classes, I continued the reading of "Undermining Oppression." In that reading there is a template where the reader can take stock of their racial privileges through answering certain questions. For their homework I told them to take those statements and replace them with sex, age, and class. I wonder who will do it. I had a good number of students express interest in this reading. The focus of the school is social justice and this reading will provide the foundation for the rest of the trimester.

Next week I am going to be teaching the kids how to take Cornell notes. Cornell notes is this certain style of notetaking. Most of the kids are smart yet seriously lack skills. One of the English teachers is going to implement Cornell notes in her classes and we are talking about trying to standardize the usage across the school. Considering how small the school is that shouldn't be that hard.

The internet also miraculously started working again. The district giveth and the district taketh away. So now I got computers hooked up and I just need to get a printer going. I've really rearranged the classroom and in my opinion made better use of the space. All my CTM students now have cubby holes and there is a closet space that has been opened up. I believe that we are the only class that has that much space. We are pretty lucky in that regard. There is a lot of storage space in that school that isn't being taken advantage of. Heck we got 2 pianos downstairs in the nasty dungeon room. We could clear up a lot of space in the school. The main problem with the school is just an incredible level of disorganization and aversion to technology.

I have to write a proposal to get money to buy computer grading software... that's ridiculous. The software only costs $249. All the new teachers are highly computer saavy and the software would make life just that much easier.

I posted up the "I am" poems the kids seemed to enjoy having them up. At the end of class when I did contracts, they were up and reading the different poems. One of the mentor teachers at my credential school said that posting up student work was one of the best intervention strategies around.