Monthly Archives: November 2008

“-isms” (Also: mucous)

November 29, 2008
By
“-isms” (Also: mucous)

All this sleeping in this week is making me a little laggy… When we were talking about idiosyncrasies and -isms the other day, one of the kids brought up the fact that I have a lot of “Mr. Coward-isms.” Point well taken. Examples follow. (Some of them already have their own entries.) 1. MYOB – Mind your own business. Although it’s usually said “bidness.” The initials (a staple of Dear Abby advice back in the day) are always present on one or more whiteboards in my room. When we read Tom Sawyer, it changes to TTYOB – Tend to your OWN bidness, as Aunt Polly tells Jim. As I tell the kids, “You have enough trouble doing that.” Other variations include, “Is this your conversation?” and “I wasn’t talking to you.” 2. The Quiet Stick 3. The Raffle King 4. Clickers 5. “Save it for circle time.” – Seventh graders always want to share (except when you want them to, or about what you want them to). They like to take the discussion off-track. I like a detour now and then, but…when they start wanting to share stories and “this happened to my friend” and… Well, I’m not big on

Read more »

“It’s how I was taught!”

November 24, 2008
By

Two day week! Woo hoo. The timing worked out better this year, and I finished The Giver last week (no Jeopardy, though), so I have two days for “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” Perfect. For these two days, we’re going to work on listening skills. Today, we didn’t even use paper. Even seventh graders appreciate the irony of a whole period IN ENGLISH, without writing. I always start this play by discussing a few things: 1. What makes people afraid. We start with death (and spiders) and come around to the idea that it’s really the unknown that most people fear. “If someone came back from the dead, and said, ‘Hey, it’s pretty cool floating around on a cloud, riffing on your harp all day,’ I don’t think anybody would be afraid of death. ” 2. What fear does to you. It makes you dumb, especially when you’re in a group. We talk about Franklin Roosevelt’s famous line about nothing to fear but fear itself, and after a quick summary of the Great Depression (it’s convenient, if painful, that we’re reliving certain aspects of that currently; this year’s bunch seemed to grasp the ideas better), I ask them,

Read more »

“It works!”

November 21, 2008
By

Today’s test was the second go-round with the new “70% or SSI” rule. I had about 35 not make the cut last time, and I’ve still been wrastlin’ with how best to use the 10 minutes I have them for each day. Originally, the plan was to keep them all in at break for a week. Then I thought I might have a sliding scale; one or days for almost making it, and progressing upward as your score goes downward. But since I’ve been actually trying to do a little remediation during that time, (I’ve been looking at the item analysis in the CPS software, and seeing which questions most of them got wrong, and working on those) I think I have a system figured out. On day one of SSI, we go over the questions that the majority of them got wrong. On day two, as they come in the door, I hand each of them a 15 question retake version of the test. Score 13+ and you’re done with SSI. On day three we go over the retake with those that didn’t make it again, and they try another retake on day four. The process repeats until they

Read more »

Sage in the Chair (CPS still rules.)

November 20, 2008
By
Sage in the Chair (CPS still rules.)

A while back, someone (a non-teacher) asked me what my teaching style was. Hmmm. Instructive sarcasm? Peer pressure and public humiliation? Random reinforcement and punishment? Entertainment and containment? Sink or swim? I say jump, you say how high? Teachers know what sage on the stage and guide on the side mean, but those aren’t really me either. All I could come up with on the spot was, “I ask a lot of questions.” I guess these days, it’s something like a high-tech, testing oriented, version of the Socratic method. I pretest by asking a bunch of questions. Then we go over the answers, right and wrong, and discuss why the wrong ones are wrong, and why some of them might have been chosen. Then I explain the correct answers and we practice. Then I ask them more questions to see if they’re getting it. We explain the corrects and incorrects again, and so on. I mean, obviously you gotta spice it up with discussions and videos and quickwrites and mental floss and other activities (remember, almost any variation from the norm is manna to seventh graders), and there are an awful lot of asides and much explaining, but that’s my

Read more »

“…flopping around at the end of the rope.”

November 19, 2008
By

They say that the longer you teach at a particular grade level, the more you start to resemble a student at that grade level. In my case, I was already there when I started. Some who know me say that I’m barely out of junior high myself. (My wife pegs me from 13-16, depending…) So it’s easy for me to see how easy it is for my students to drift a bit. And certain things fascinate them, so I should know better than to even open certain doors. But, of course… Yesterday, we were debriefing after chapter 19, where The Giver makes Jonas watch his “father” release the lighter of the two identical twins. (Aside: I have a set of twins this year – one year I had 3 sets – and they have been great sports about us joking about releasing one of them. In fact, their birthweights are nearly identical to the ones in the book, with the same separation. One of them we now call “Little Guy.”) They were appalled by what Jonas witnessed. They couldn’t cope. We talked about China’s one child policy, and how many times only boys were “allowed to be born.” We talked

Read more »

Random Featured Post

Three-Word Phrases

Seventh graders “communicate” mostly in three-word phrases. If the phrase isn’t really only three words long, they can usually pare it down. “What’d I miss?” It sounds like  “Wuddeyemiss.” And it always comes right as you’re starting class. Raise your hand if you have had this happen in the past week. Past three days? Today? AAAAAARGH.  They want 54 stellar, well-planned and executed minutes of instruction summarized for them in 30 seconds as the class bustles in.  What did you miss? “Absolutely nothing. You might as well take the rest of the year off. CHECK THE WEB PAGE! COME BACK AT BREAK!” “Oh yeah. I forgot.” LOL (These days, they’re getting it down to three-letter phrases.) “What’s my grade?” This one is usually from the kid whose grade is in the bottom 15% , and s/he finally turned something in, and wants immediate gratification. And it always happens right in the middle of something else, something totally unrelated.  Yesterday we were talking about how Charlotte is finally seeing Captain Jaggery for what he really is. (Aside: If you haven’t read The True Adventures of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, I highly recommend it. I picked it up a few years ago [...]

more -->


Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

Archives

November 2008
M T W T F S S
« Oct   Dec »
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Recent Comments

Links

Privacy Policy

Tags

cartoons Charlotte Doyle Class Activities clickers CPS CTEL Flashback grammar high school idiosyncrasies irony Mailbag Me mechanics middle school teaching Monsters on Maple Street Moodle online learning oral reading Outsiders CHapter 5 Outsiders Chapter 7 RaffleKing Ray Bradbury Reading Richard Cory Seventh Grade Behavior Stories of Seventh Grade substituting Teaching Teaching Tips teaching with technology teaching with technology teaching writing Technology techology testing The Earth Men The Giver The Midwife's Apprentice The Outsiders Tips Tips for teachers Tom Sawyer Wiki Writing