lunchbyteblog

my first day back at school. the end of the endless summer. the workdays before the kids arrive. hmmm... i really do love teaching. it is a part of me. i think back to a lot of the other decisions that i made when i was 17 and i shudder. but the decision to become a teacher worked out pretty well. here i am- a scant 22 years later. walking in to another year of school. and while i'm sorry to see summer go because i enjoy it so much, i like the beginning of school. not so much the work days, because i never seem to get a lot of work done. but i like school because of the kids. i like to challenge them and i want them to challenge me. i live for the moments when the light bulb comes on for them. i like to joke with them and i like to push them to think. i want them to examine their world and i want them to find out something about it and themselves. i want them to learn. and that's why i do it. that's why many teachers do it. i could complain about the salar...

I'm sitting here at my table in the ap world history training and we are looking at the dbq (the document based question) that is a part of the ap world history test. As we talk about it, I am struck with just how important it is that we, as teachers, teach thinking skills. Now that may seem like a no-brainer, but really thinking skills are often lost in the greater quest of content. We spend so much time worrying about content that we often don't take the time to teach kids how to think. We do this because of high stakes end of course testing. The majority of tests that our kids take are based on their ability to answer content specific multiple choice questions. So teachers worry and fret about getting content across to kids. This emphasis on content can be counter productive though. Kids may be able to regurgitate facts and figures for these tests but the current state of end of course tests doesn't really push students to develop thinking skills and that's s...

i'm sure that one of these days i will come up with a coherent thought about our experiences at ap camp. between now and then you can continue to read crosson's blog about the experience. it is here: crossonedu.wordpress.com i will tell you guys that we went to jamestown today and it was pretty cool. pics and funny video to follow at some point. i promise we are learning quite a bit. i just find it difficult to put it together when i am in the middle of it.

so, i'm here in williamsburg, va being trained in ap world history. there are two of us from my school here. myself and our english teacher. he is getting training in english literature. i was going to post a lot about what we are doing but i decided to let him tell you about what was happening. he has a new blog and he typed out today's entry on his itouch. it took him a while. small keyboard and such. go here to check it out: crossonedu.wordpress.com i'll post some more of our exploits tomorrow and i'll let you all know how things are going. until then, you are going to have to get the goods from him. short and sweet but i'll be blogging more as we go.

as we wind down this school year, amid the testing and the retesting, our thoughts turn to next year. one of my coworkers, an awesome teacher, has begun to think about the idea of a paperless classroom. now before you get started, he isn't getting rid of the books. he teaches english and he wants the kids to hold books in their hands. he wants them to read. he just doesn't want to waste paper on handouts, quizzes, tests, worksheets, etc... so he asked me to try and brainstorm some ideas for him and for me to pass along any ideas that i might hear. i told him that i think it is a great idea and we have begun to discuss the ways he could pull this off. he teaches in one of our computer labs so there are all sorts of web tools he could use to make his classroom mostly paperless. we have talked about wikis, skype , twitter , sasinschools , polleverywhere , and lots of other sites that we already use. our school webpages have the ability to post quizzes but i think he is goi...

it's about this time every year that i begin to get bored with the things that i have been doing all year long and i begin to think about ways to tear apart the classroom experience. it isn't that i haven't been trying new things and new innovations all year, i have. it's just that i have tried them and used them and now i want to try something completely new. the problem is that everything still seems too teacher centered. i really want my students to be responsible for their own learning. but what does that look like in a class of fifteen year olds? how do i tell them what they need to know without telling them what they need to know? i could come up with multiple approaches for each lesson and i could turn them loose. or i could ask them what they want to learn and we could learn some things together. maybe i could have them teach me something new about the world. i just don't know. the point here is that i know that things need to change and i know tha...

as my world history students are working on answering questions about the marshall plan, I have some nice and relaxing tunes playing in the background. I set up a pandora account a while back and i have managed to spend enough time tweaking my stations that i now have several stations that i can play in the classroom while my students are working. I have found that there seems to be less off task talking when there is music playing. I already let my students listen to their mp3 players when they are working on answering questions. Sometimes i play them some of my music, sometimes i let pandora play. The station that we are listening to today is a calexico station that i enjoy because it plays mostly instrumental. This keeps the kids from singing along but it gives them something to listen to in the background. i know that i have blogged about music in the classroom before, but today it just seemed like the music was setting the mood. and that's all right.