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Posts Tagged ‘#28daysofwriting’

  1. One of those days

    5 February 2015 by shartley

    LoveHartley

    I had one of those days but I still feel positive about it.  It has been over a year since I last had to teach all five lessons in a day so I was a little wary of the load before me as I arrived at school and felt a little under-prepared for my Year 9 Geography class after they achieved more than I expected yesterday.  I arrived at school at my usual 8am, just 20 minutes before I had a meeting, so after checking email and other notices I opened the PowerPoint that was listed on the program as what I should be teaching Year 9 today.  It was a horrendous PowerPoint of four slides: a title, a map and two covered in text.  I quickly spread the text over a few extra slides and then searched for images and interesting tid-bits on the Internet to accompany the slides.  I was about half way through this exercise when I had to go to the meeting.

    Meeting completed, Home Room done and then Period 1 Year 11 Society and Culture where we went through the Fundamental and Additional Concepts, followed by Period 2 Business Studies where students looked at an airline/tourism case study regarding goods and services and then examined Domino’s Pizza Operations Report from their 2013 Annual Report.  All this went without a hitch.

    At recess I skipped returning to my staff room so I could have some time to set-up for my first proper Geography lesson with Year 7 and steal some time to finish the PowerPoint…ambitious for a twenty minute break.  Even more unlikely when a colleague grabs you for a conversation en route.  Absolutely impossible when you arrive at the Year 7 classroom and realise you left your computer cords in your regular classroom.  A quick trot back and forth and it was almost time for the students to arrive.  Two of the other Year 7 teachers arrived and there was talk of classroom swaps.  I bowed out graciously and continued my set-up.

    The Year 7s were quite good and 27 of 30 students successfully copied the worksheet from the original into their own newly established Geography folders in Google Drive.  The other three were unsuccessful due to internet issues.  However, being Year 7 they had loads of questions and I ran late to Year 9 Geography back in my regular classroom.

    When I arrived the Year 9s were making a lot of noise outside the class.  When I let them in we had a talk about appropriate behaviour and my eyes scanned the room detecting the lock box as opened with the remote for the IWB missing.  I kept looking and some of the boys said a teacher had told them to tell me she’d put it on…something.  They obviously hadn’t heard her clearly but couldn’t be bothered to clarify.  The remote couldn’t be found so I sent a boy to the teacher who was then off class.  She said another teacher who she named may have taken it.  I sent a kid to that teacher and thankfully he came back with it, without a message to accompany it.  Right, now I could show the PowerPoint, half improved.  But no, in the meantime my computer had encountered an error, had restarted and I couldn’t find a recoverable file (stupid me hadn’t saved the half-improved version) so in a bind I ran with the boring original.  I surprised myself with how much I knew about reading a map and making it interesting for the students but then we hit the text.  Groans.  I handed out post-it notes for students who finished first to write ways people could reduce water usage and just single notes as the slower writers finished, to fill the gap of catch-up as students finished writing.  I rarely use PowerPoint and this is one of the reasons why.  More groans with the second slide of text.  Four boys had passively resisted working and just didn’t write or type most of the material so were kept in to finish at lunch.  One of those four had “I love Ms Hartley” on a post-it note on his forehead, his friend had one with “Hit Me” written on it but just on his desk (at least my name was spelt correctly).  I’m guessing that originally they were put on students’ backs.  Mr Forehead Guy now has to see his Dean about it since I passed it up the line due to the personal nature of it.  The Deans are really good at dealing with the boys who are pushing at boundaries like this.

    Despite this boring text writing lesson and the resistance to work from a handful, I think it went well.  I’ve worked out I don’t like teaching Geography because I’m not passionate about it but also because the resources in programs at both this school and my last one are incredibly boring and I become tired of reinventing the wheel every time I’m placed on Geography.  I was ashamed today to put up such a boring PowerPoint and the boringness was reflected in the boys’ behaviour.  So I can do battle with the resources before going to class which generally takes two hours for every hour of teaching it or I can just battle disengaged students.  I prefer to do the former normally.  The four boys I kept in were quite friendly and understood that it was caused by their own actions (or lack thereof) and didn’t hold a grudge, or even some begrudging respect for recognising their resistance to work.

    After a short lunch last period was Year 12 Society and Culture where one of the students conducted a focus group for her PIP.  She hadn’t thought through seating arrangements so it took her a while to work that out and then the class was argumentative and loud but she handled it well.  I stayed out of the whole thing to maintain the integrity of it being her focus group.

    At the end of the school day I had to chase down some printing I lost the previous day, wrote up the demerits and merits for the day and then did that PowerPoint even though I will probably never use it, simply because I had been half way there and the websites I had used were listed in my History.  I left school at 5.30pm, half an hour after my self-imposed time limit for this year, and last to leave in my section of the school, but pleased that I had managed the day calmly and reasonably successfully despite the hurdles and hiccups along the way.

    HomeTime


  2. Expectations

    4 February 2015 by shartley

    WaterCycle7 WaterCycle11 WaterCycle10 WaterCycle9 WaterCycle8 WaterCycle2 WaterCycle6 WaterCycle5 WaterCycle4 WaterCycle3

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Boys can’t draw.  Year 9 Boys are horrible.  So many kids with special needs in that class, you’re going to struggle to get anything done.

    These are the sort of statements that have been tossed around as I prepared to teach Year 9 Geography this week.  The game was a huge hook but now I had to follow up on it.  I found a lame but mildly entertaining video clip on YouTube to cover the Natural Water Cycle and then asked the students to draw an A4 sized diagram of the Natural Water Cycle in the workbooks.  There were mutterings of “I can’t draw” but all but a handful just got on with it.  The first step for most of them was an online image search for a diagram and then they copied it into their books.  As the first few were finishing I added to the task that they had to introduce 2-3 examples of the human impact on the Natural Water Cycle and then to write a paragraph about these human impacts.

    By far the majority of the diagrams were fabulous and the students were on task and even engaged.  I’m not sure why.  Every time I congratulated a student on a good drawing they swelled with pride.  When I took photos of some of the better ones, again they were pleased.  It doesn’t take much.  There are only four boys out of the 29 present today that had sub-standard drawings.  I’m quite pleased with that result.

    At the end of the lesson I introduced the class to the Google Class I had established for them and chaos ensued as they all encountered various issues with joining the Google Class.  I had a student expert in the room who helped and eventually we had just about everyone logged in.  Then the silliness commenced as they chatted within the Google Class page.  I said they had an hour to take the messages down or there would be consequences.  One student asked how they were to take them down and I said if they could figure out how to do a comment they could figure out how to delete them.  A few hours later I checked and they were all gone.

    There was a similar occurrence with Year 7 last week as they were being introduced to various online tools within a ‘Getting to Know the Library’ exercise.  A task asked students to add a sticky about their favourite book in Padlet.  Like it was with Year 9, silliness prevailed and there were silly comments all over the Padlet page very quickly.  We talked about the first impressions they were making of themselves online and in person, that Year 7 was a fresh start and a chance to establish the person they wanted to be and how they wanted to be seen and respected.  The silliness subdued after that.


  3. Let’s Get Physical

    4 February 2015 by shartley

    10000

     

    I teach at a Catholic school and this morning we had our Dedication Mass, as in dedicating the academic year to God.  It went for over an hour with lots of standing and sitting, singing, sitting still and listening, walking up for Communion, crossing oneself and consuming the wafer and all that’s once we enter the building.  1700 people in one large space and I am continually amazed at the awe and quiet the students display for most of the service and when we have assemblies.  It’s a different story in the classrooms!

    My school is on 42 hectares and my staffroom and classroom are almost as far as they can be from the Sports Centre where we conduct large school gatherings.  My staffroom is on the third storey at the top of the hill whereas the Sports Centre is down the bottom next to the ovals, yes, that would be a plural of three ovals.

    I was tired this morning.  Actually, I’m usually tired, but this morning I was particularly tired. When I’m particularly tired I go to the coffee cart that hangs around at school most days before the first class.  It was absent this morning.  On the way back to class from Mass I popped into the Canteen and asked for caffeine and discovered that the canteen keeps full strength Coke, just for staff, since it is deemed too unhealthy to serve to students.  I downed that Coke rather quickly and it kept me going the rest of the day.

    I am not a PDHPE teacher, nor do I teach a practical subject, but sometimes teaching feels incredibly physical.  I constantly roam through the desks to check on students’ progress and wellbeing, tripping over schoolbags and running into desks (my first year teaching I had permanent bruises on my thighs from collecting the corners of desks).  I know when I’m writing excessively on the board when my arm becomes tired.  The worst time though was the morning after my first ever boxing class at the gym, my hands were shaking so much I had to give in and change the plan for the day.  There are 48 stairs between my main classroom and my staffroom; we call the stairwell The Stairmaster.  Between playground duty, classes and staffroom I generally walk 6000 steps each day without trying.  Last Friday it was 10,000 steps but that included about 1000 steps at the gym in the morning and another 1000 in the evening at the shops.  Now this isn’t that much and I should be walking 10,000 steps each day since I am trying to lose weight but due to the accumulative effect of all this hard surface walking, some excessive walking days (in New York 6 months ago I did many days in excess of 20,000 steps) and my more recent attempts to try to become a runner again (I’ve tried before but am yet to declare myself one) I have damaged my feet so that I have plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendonitis in both feet, but much more in the left than the right.  The pain in my left heel can be excruciating and it is starting to impact upon my teaching.  I now often sit down during Home Room.  I know that sounds rate innocuous but it means I interact less with the students.  I am more likely to email someone then go find them for a face-to-face conversation.  My physio taught me today how to tape up my own foot and is sending me back to the GP because I have an incredible amount of swelling around my ankles at the end of the school day.

    PS I’m not happy with this post, its boring topic or its whingey nature but I suppose the pain post physio this afternoon dominated my thoughts.  I wouldn’t post it except that I have made a commitment to #28daysofwriting – hopefully tomorrow I’ll have something a little cheerier to write about.


  4. Game

    2 February 2015 by shartley

    Game

    Game on!

    Last period today I finally met my Year 9 Geography class properly.  We are starting with the topic of Water Management and on the weekend I found this wonderfully appropriate game called Catchment Detox.  So today I introduced the course by just asking them to play the game for the whole 64 minute lesson, briefly raising the idea of showing them how to play, but they assured me they could work it out for themselves and in the most part, they did.  The game involves taking 100 turns and at each turn deciding upon how to raise money through industry (eg various forms of agriculture and/or tourism), how to manage water supplies (eg investing in water research and/or building dams) and other ecological decisions (eg whether to make national parks).  I dangled a prize of a packet of lollies for the highest score by the time of our next lesson on Wednesday.

    Some students went slowly and carefully while others went at great speed and played nearly three times in the time period.  They were allowed to play in pairs or individually with most choosing individually but openly discussing tactics with each other.  As some became more adept at the game they helped others.  Some were competitive, trying to find out each other’s achievements.  Interesting, even though I had said score/rank was what would win the prize, most of the focus was on how much money they were earning.  I heard conversations about cows versus pigs, orchards versus rice and excitement about investing in viticulture.  Questions of each other were asked about salinity, where one should build a dam and the merits of logging.  A handful of students listened to music with ear buds and one played music quietly on his laptop, muting it whenever I came near, as if I couldn’t hear it unless I was standing right next to him.  Other than looking for music, I didn’t see any screens not on the game until the last few minutes of the lesson.

    Many students were scoring in the 500,000s (I achieved 599,602 in my only game yesterday) but then 5 minutes before the end, a student who already shows signs of being disengaged, low achieving and disruptive in a ‘regular’ class environment was excited to achieve 642,000+ and was very pleased to have a fuss made about it. When I say ‘signs’ I guess I mainly mean his attitude or perhaps just my teacher’s sixth sense.

    I learned about lots of the students’ behaviour (who swears, who becomes loud when excited, who is competitive and so on) and they had a lot of fun.  They left class feeling good about themselves, with most of them thanking me for the class.  The next lesson will be about what sort of issues Australia faces in regards to water management and I bet they’ll have heaps to contribute now.  I look forward to seeing them with their thinking caps on, applying the game to real life, and hopefully engaging in authentic learning.  I’m glad I was game enough to throw them into chaos from Day One.


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