Day 88: The Praxis of Pedagogy

Since my friend Jeremy was all demoralized I decided to ask the following journal question to my 1st and 2nd periods: Why don't students seem to care? What can be done to help make students participants in their own education? What can be done in the community? What can teachers do? How much of it is personal responsibility?

After I asked that question, I got into a discussion with both periods about what they wrote down. I summarized their thoughts on an overhead. Interesting stuff that I'll have to blog later about. Unfortunately, I left it at school. But it was an interesting discussion and it is good to hear from people. When they were writing their answer in the journal I walked around and noticed that were really into it. This was reflected in the discussion. I think next trimester I will have student led discussions on Friday. I firmly believe that they should have more control and say in their education and hopefully this will be a way to make that happen. If they are to be the future leaders then they must learn how to lead and be given chances to do so. After that I showed them all an overhead calendar of how much time we had left in the trimester. Not counting today we have 5 days left of instruction before presentations and finals week. Scary. Next I handed back contracts and had everyone write that they had till Thursday to turn in all their missing work and corrected tests. Nothing will be accepted after that.

In my first period, my anticipatory set was, "What is a Napoleon Complex?" One student answered something about power so I gave him a point for being the only one to try. So I explained the Napoleon complex or little man's syndrome or martinet. Whatever you want to call it. Then I tied that mentality in to people they know in life and finally to Napoleon and his coming to power in France. This got into Napoleon's downfall which got into the Peninsular War and guerrilla warfare. So I started to talk about guerilla warfare. Class ended on this.

In my second period, I broke people into groups and then had them write on all the various ways that change could be created with themselves, their school, their communities, their nation, and the world. Class ended on this.

My 3rd period I took my students to the Asian Art Museum. I told them before that if they embarrassed me that I would make it my life mission to make sure they never go on any field trip ever again. They behaved wonderfully. Most had never been to a museum before so just the fact that they were there was great. But I left them to wander around as I did the same.