Creativity Week

My school is a pretty unique place. One of my favorite parts about my job (other than my relationships with my students, which is far and away my favorite part) is that I get to coordinate Creativity Week. This means that I poll students and staff to find out what sorts of wacky projects they would like to work on and then facilitate a week of work and presentations where they just go to town on the project of their liking. 

This year some of the projects included:

-building a Rube Goldberg machine

-playing with Raspberry Pi computers

-Junk Art (making art from found objects like magazines, bottle caps, egg cartons, etc)

-Slam Poetry

-Film making

-KPOP

-Zombie Apocalypse!

Here's a video about a few of the different groups, made by the Creative Media group.

I really loved seeing the students outside of the traditional educational setting. If only we had Creativity Week every week!

What if social media is bad for both introverts AND extroverts?

Is social media anti-introvert?
 [Please note that I said introverts and not shy people.]
My dear friend, who is quite the introvert, never uses his social media. He uses the internet all the time, but it is usually to "consume" and not "contribute" and the sources are usually information-related not people-focused. Social mediums, like Facebook and Twitter, just aren't interesting for him. This makes sense: people wear him out, so wouldn't people on the internet wear him out, too?

Then I started wondering if social media is rough for extroverts too.
Extroverts (myself included) find nourishment from other people, so social media should be ideal for us. But often times, I'll find myself going to Facebook looking for company, only to get off half an hour later feeling jealous and even more lonely. Although I "interacted" with several people, I didn't have the pleasure of their company and human energy, which is what revives me.

Jake Reilly's "Amish Project" inspired these questions:

Student skits

My Spanish students wrote skits to use their phone vocabulary in a more authentic setting. These delightful videos are what came of what was just going to be a normal homework assignment. I love being in a setting where we can go with the flow and change our class plans in order to meet the students' interests.

Thomas really likes anime and he's always drawing cartoons for class, so his skit involved some anime characters.

Miya loves Maroon 5, so she focused her skit on Adam Levine. 

I was so happy with Rebekah's skit, especially given how quiet she is in class!

Guess they really wanted to go to WalMart. 

Is education a part of the service industry?

Recently, I have been thinking about how educators need to carefully consider and construct their material in ways that is palatable to their "clients" and how these clients are actually two different target audiences: students and parents. In my lesson planning, not only do I need to make sure that my students will be engaged and actively learning, but I have to make sure that the parents will find the content and methods acceptable for their child. 

This led me to ask if education falls under the category of "service industry," where the customer is always right. Wikipedia says, 

"The service sector consists of the "soft" parts of the economy, i.e. activities where people offer their knowledge and time to improve productivity, performance, potential, and sustainability. The basic characteristic of this sector is the production of services instead of end products. Services (also known as "intangible goods") include attention, advice, access, experience, and discussion. ... Service providers face obstacles selling services that goods-sellers rarely face. Services are not tangible, making it difficult for potential customers to understand what they will receive and what value it will hold for them."

Although you might disagree with me when I say that education is not about the end product, I think there is little question that education does indeed focus on "attention, advice, access, experience, and discussion." That, in fact, is a fantastic summary of what I would like to provide to my students. 

However, if education does fall into the tertiary sector of the economy, it means that our goal as educators is to please those we serve, exactly because it is "difficult for ... customers to understand what they will receive and what value it will hold for them."

So, are educators to cater to what our clients want? If so, we must ask if we are to prioritize the wants and needs of our students or those of the parents. 

Or are educators bound by some different code and driven to present material that is judged by a different standard, and therefore less immediately pleasing to our "customers"? I fear that consumer-driven education would perpetuate homeostasis, where students only learned what they found enjoyable and what was directly related to their parents’ experiences. I’ve found that my most rapid personal growth has happened when I was in situations far removed from the world of my childhood, the exact world that my parents (ever so lovingly) crafted.

I must admit that part of this train of thought stems from some parents questioning what I am teaching their children. To a certain extent, I understand their point of view: they know their child better than I do; they have more invested in their child than I do; they will live with their child far longer than I will. Ultimately, I do not get to make the over-arching decisions regarding the life of the young person. But I still wonder: am I working for knowledge, or for parents?

El Gran Gatsby: a trailer

My wonderful Independent Spanish Study student made this trailer for The Great Gatsby...but in Spanish. She did all of the translations herself. There was no assignment; she just decided that she wanted to do it and she up and did it!

Nice work, Alex!

English is changing

This year, I teach Language Arts (English), Life Skills, and the Senior Seminar in addition to Spanish. This has given me an opportunity to see our students writing in English. While it is nice to be able to see a visible change in students work thanks to my efforts, I would rather not have to do this much work. That is to say, these students are not good writers, especially in terms of spelling and punctuation.
But, as a linguist, I can also respect that my students will define the future of our language and that, in the end, many of their habits will become the new norm. Here are a few of my predictions based on their writing.

1. Either periods or capitalization will disappear. Maybe both. I'm leaning towards the demise of periods, though.
2. Speaking of capitalization, "I" isn't going to stay capitalized for very long.
3. "A lot" will become one word.
4. Something drastic is going to happen with our spelling. While I completely agree that the internet and widespread access to technology (and the accompanying auto-correct tools) has standardized language, it also means that kids do not know how to spell for themselves. I see orthographic changes happening in the written informal writing of English, French and Spanish.
5. Contractions are losing their punctuation. I doubt that there will be a written difference between "its" and "it's" or that the contraction of "I am" will keep the apostrophe.
6. The use of commas is changing. I don't quite understand it fully, but I think that it is being used anywhere where there should be a break but the author isn't ready to end the idea.
7. Homophones' spelling will merge. I see "I ate there, two," and "Are you going to?" a good bit. It throws me off guard every time, but the kids read over it without pause.

What do you think, fellow English teachers? What did I miss?

Independent learning in Langauge Arts

I write this as a follow-up to my previous post about our Language Arts class and their goal to change the world through writing.

Right now, they are all working independently.  Here's what they're doing.

-One is reading The Last Child in the Woods on GoogleBooks.
-Another is looking up celebrities that were bullied.
-The animal-lovers are conducting informational interviews over the phone. (They just made a blog -- check it out!)
-A pair is writing a skit to perform for children in local hospitals.
-Several are sending out surveys to their classmates to gauge knowledge and interest.
-The designer is learning how to actually make clothes (instead of just dream about them).
-My language learner is tutoring others on LiveMocha to understand how language is acquired.
-One is making a blog about the human heart.
-Two are engaged in a hot debate about what to do next.
-My peacenik is researching Gandhi.

Man, are they focused! They don't even have instructions. I just asked them to have a specific goal for today and to come back to me in an hour to describe their progress to the class. I am one lucky duck to have kids so dedicated and interested!