Day 73: The Praxis of Pedagogy

The Praxis of Pedagogy!!! What an ivory tower elitist title. But really I love words. I love the way words can express an entire thought or concept so compendiously. I mean schadenfreude... there's a word for that!!! Germans.

Anyways, I started the day off with SSR and typing tutor. Students like the routine. Stability. They crave it. In my first period class, I had kids count off 1 and 2 and then they got into those groups. I handed out the study guide and then gave students 15 minutes to work together in groups and come up with the answers. Then I had predivided their sticks and pulled a stick from each group. The 2 students came up and played rock, paper, and scissors to see who got the question. The winner that answered a question correctly got 3 points. If they didn't know the answer they could get help from their team and earn 1 point. The team that had all their members get a point each got a point. This way students could earn points themselves but also get team points. I am thinking for my next class changing the point payoff to 2 points if they get it by themselves. 1 point for them and 1 point for their teammate if they get help from someone on the team. And the team still gets 1 point if their team wins. Students really liked playing the game. I also gave out 2 index cards to them and said that they could have notes on the index cards if they wrote all answers out 3 times. Making them write it out 3 times will probably be the only repetition they will do and at least it's something.

In 2nd period, we talked about the end of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles and how it led to WWII. I called this one student out that has major attitude and thinks he's smarter than me. I would ask him questions about things that happened to see if he knew the answer. Sometimes he did... a lot of times he didn't. I love it when the kids think they are smarter than me and know more history. What was really cool though was that the class was totally interacting with me about the history. This one kid that I got that has low reading and writing skills totally knew what was up. He remembered what I said. He is the perfect example of skill level not being the same as intelligence. He remembered what I had said and intereacting with the knowledge and asked questions that didn't fit into what he had learned. Good kid... but never shuts the fuck up.

In 3rd period, I told them about a field trip we are going on to the Asian Art Museum. The museum has a free day on the 1st Tuesday of the month so we are going to go after 2nd period during lunch. We talked about eating in the city and stuff. I want to get them hooked into this idea so that I can use this as an incentive to do well in class. After that we talked about the model minority myth some more. I'm really impressed with their insight into race.