Day 109: The Praxis of Pedagogy

Oh my God! Here I am again. It's 4:00 in the morning and I have no business being up. I thought I had kicked this early morning wakeup habit but here I am again. Part of the reason I went to bed so early last night was because I'm fighting off an illness. My wife has been sick all weekend and I've been teetering on the brink of full blown illin'. I know exactly what's going to happen too. I'm going to make it to the winter break and then just get laid out. That's the way it goes. My body just has enough gas to get me to the break and then it's over. It's a shitty way to start the break. That's the thing with being a teacher that they don't tell you about. Illness. Kids are vectors. All they do is carry disease from place to place with their poor hygiene habits. When I first started teaching at the elementary school level I would get crazy sick. Little kids are even dirtier and will get you even sicker. But apparently after a few years of getting crazy sick your body adjusts and you don't get sick that often. However, I'm starting to question that considering my wife has been teaching for like 7 years and is still getting sick.

Anyways, in my classes yesterday I started off with a short SSR and then I counted students off 1 & 2 and broke them into groups. In these groups, I handed out the study questions for the test and had them work together to come up with the answers.

While they were doing that I called students up and gave out their student ID numbers. I posted a list of grades with student ID numbers in the back of the class so students can check their grades on a regular basis. That is going to be one of my goals this quarter. Last quarter, I really wanted to get discipline down and I feel that I got that going. Knock on wood. This quarter I need to work on keeping up with grading shit. I hate grading. It's a pain in the ass. My least favorite part of the job without a doubt. But putting things off doesn't help me or the students, so I need to do a better job with that. I don't have many assignments so far so most students had really good grades. One student that had an A commented that he had never seen his grade at an A before. Sad. Hopefully seeing their grade on a more consistent basis will provide more motivation to do things to raise up their grades or keep them good. Hopefully.

While they were coming up with answers for the study questions I also collected their meta-cognitive plan of action. Meta-cognition as I'm teaching it has 3 elements. A before, during and after. I assigned over the weekend the before part. This homework assignment was also points on their test. So it was a homework assignment slash take home test. Sadly, I only got about half of the assignments even when I gave them by the end of the day to turn it in. Their homework/take home test points for today is to do the during part of meta-cognition. On the test I'll have the after part of meta-cognition. This is not a hard assignment. There are basically about 5 questions for each element. 5 questions about their own thinking. All they have to do is write down what they are thinking. Not even an essay. I was accepting short answers. Shit I was accepting pretty much anything. Turn something in.

So after about 20-25 minutes of group studying we played the rock-paper-scissors game in teams. I told classes that whatever team that won would get extra credit points. My 1st and 2nd period classes tied but in the 3rd period class one team got slaughtered. We'll see how meta-cognition works for them. I'm going to make this another goal in my class and have them do meta-cognition stuff for every test.

So we have a gang problem in my school. I work at an inner city urban school so it's not surprising. Nortenos vs. Surenos. But they aren't the problem. There is another group of kids that have started their own gang. This new gang is composed of the outcastes in the school. This gang worries me more than the other gangs. A lot of kids in the Nortenos and the Surenos are trying to get out of gangs. They deal with real daily violence. They come to my school because we have a zero tolerance fight policy and they feel safe there. This new gang has a bunch of kids that need to prove themselves. A lot of kids that don't deal with the daily violence that the real gang members deal with. Plus, talking with the school counselor and my own general observations tells me that these kids are brimming with anger. 2 words pop into my mind. Can you guess them? Trenchcoat mafia. But I doubt that most of those kids will be coming back next year so hopefully we can break up this little group.