Day 67: The Praxis of Pedagogy

On Friday I started off all my classes with a battle typing tutor. I had students get on the computers and I gave them 1 minute to play a game and type as many words as they could. Then I awarded the winner 15 academic points. In my first period, I talked about Islam and the roots and Hagar and Ishmael. I think that this was really surprising to kids to find out that Islam has roots with Christianity and Judaism. We ended class on the 3rd pillar of Islam Sawm. I had a problem with a student that doesn't want to do anything in class and has a bad attitude. One of my rules in class is no personal grooming. No less than 5 minutes before I caught this student combing her hair I had taken 5 tickets away from another student that was grooming. She got all huffy and shit.

In my 2nd period I got so damn frustrated. We were doing the reading "War is a racket" and I had students get into their groups and finish up the reading they were doing the previous day. Some students didn't know what chapter they were reading. I said for them to look over the reading and see which chapter they were on. Some couldn't figure it out. It was the fucking day before. They were only supposed to read two chapters. One of the chapters everyone was reading and the other chapter was just one short chapter. There was no reason that they shouldn't have remembered just a little bit of what they were reading from the DAY BEFORE!!!! It wasn't hard. It was a jigsaw. After student finally figured things out then I had them get into their chapter groups and go over the reading together. This way students could solidify the chapter they read with others that read the same chapter. After there was a common agreement on the main ideas in a chapter, I had them get back into their first groups to share what each chapter was about. This way everyone gets the ideas in the chapters without having read the chapters. But shit, people were having so much fucking trouble with this when it wasn't that hard.

In 3rd period I read a chapter with the students from the book "The Gangster we're all looking for". This book is somewhat like "The House on Mango Street" but with Vietnamese people. I have Vietnamese students in my class and they seemed to connect to this reading. One student got somewhat emotional as the story was being read because she had recently lost her mother and I guess it was a bit too real for her.