So I had this huge bare patch on the wall.
Problem is: it’s such a sappy, feel-good market for teacher posters. Anyone else feel me on that?
Category: tech enthusiasm
Total 120 Posts
One: here’s the original Who I Am AppleWorks file. I realize no one uses AppleWorks. More people skate on rollerblades nowadays than use AppleWorks but I don’t know of any alternatives except Pages which (sorry, Tim) scares me.
Two: I realize this blog carries with it a self-assured vibe which some find smelly and unearned. I want to admit again that the first day of school makes me feel woozy and weak. I have no answers, only activities which have sucked less than others.
The only thing I know for sure is that my kids will work from bell to bell. I’ll give them index cards at the start of class. They’ll find their seats. There will be questions on the overhead. Whatever activities we do, I’ll cross my fingers on the not-sucking issue, but we’ll be doing them until the very end of class. This matters so much. Only the rest of the year depends on it.
Three, Alice updated the first day wiki with some cool PowerPoint slides for high turnover classes. That’s it. That’s the wisdom of crowds. Two people. Me and her. Intertubes 2.0 fails me. Back to my cave.
How Did This Happen?
Never thought I’d append “wiki” to a post, but here we are. Here, approaching the dead center of August, I’m getting Google hits along the lines of “first day geometry lesson” and I don’t have content to show for it.
So I’m posting some of my first day procedures, which are by no means authoritative
Here’s my contribution, both for general ed and for math classes:
So you’ve got these sharks swimming around in the Pacific Ocean tagged with GPS transponders. Sharkrunner, a game from Discovery Channel, gives you a virtual boat, a virtual crew, affiliates you with a virtual research consortium, gives you virtual profits, but has you tracking real freaking sharks.
We talked about this, you know? Four classes, four discussions.
Four times I told them a student in Washington had been suspended for 40 days and invited speculation into his crime. He stabbed somebody? He hit a teacher? He sold drugs?
Four times through that video, which was pretty cruel in some places and probably didn’t do enough justice to the utter lameness of the teacher in others. Four times I told the class, look, you’re going to find this funny but this isn’t like the other times we play videos in class. Four times I told them I wanted their thoughts on What All This Means.