I sort have been giving my lone eighth grade class the short shrift in this here blog lately. I guess that’s because I’m so busy trying to keep my head above water. In my 18 years here, this is the third time I’ve had an eighth grade class. And the last time was 8 years ago. Not that I’m whining or anything. One of my fave things from back then was a tie-in to The Pigman. Since Mr. Pignati was, you know, old, I made them interview someone at least 60 years old. Then they turned the Q/A into a biographical sketch. Then I even made them present a brief (60 seconds or so–you know how short my attention span is) summary of the interview. This year, we went from Maus, with Artie Speigelman creating art from his interviews with his Holocaust survivor father, to The Pigman. So the “grandma interviews” were especially appropriate. I remember last time that I started the assignment with a minimum age of 70, but I had too many kids who couldn’t find someone that old to talk to. This year I went for 60, but most of the interviewees ended up being 70+. There
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Continuing (finally – boy howdy, it’s been a bit nutty lately) Mr. Coward-isms #8: 8. KBAR(R) – When I started at my school (1993), they had an independent reading program they called Kick Back and Read (KBAR). Mostly, it was a chart with a picture of Snoopy on it. Actually there were two kinds of charts. One was simply four columns labeled: Date, Time Read, Pages Read, Parent Signature. The instructions at the top of the sheet talked about reading for 15-20 minutes and cooperation at home. The other sheet was arranged a bit differently, but asked for the same info. The difference was that this one made room for an area called “Material Read.” The space was room enough for about two sentences. Most teachers asked the kids to summarize what they’d read. Halfway through that first year here, I went to a CATE conference. This was back when the district actually paid for your hotel and such. I was pretty stoked. One thing I noticed was how all the veterans would run in to a presentation, grab the handouts offered, and bolt for the next one. I actually sat through most of them. One lady talked about having
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The first day is always so… well mostly they sit and stare. Some aren’t used to having to do something on the first day. My “faves” are the ones with the fat binder… WITH NO PAPER! Hello?! What’s up with that? Or toting the giant backpack that half of them could fit in… WITH NOTHING TO WRITE WITH! Anyway. I’m getting going on my Outsiders stuff a little earlier this year. We read Motto today, and I divvied the class up into thirds to try to translate how he uses the words cool, dig, and jive. They were a bit (a lot) tentative, but we did OK. Some of them set me up nicely by trying to translate slang with other slang, so we could compare that with looking up vocabulary in the dictionary and having the definition be a word they don’t know either. They seemed to enjoy Geetz Romo, and his explanation of the concept of digging. Wait, they dug it. Dig? And that led us to the new let’s-see-how-they-write-at-the-beginning-of-the-year assignment. I think one will be fun to read. Here’s today’s agenda. (I hesitate to call it a lesson plan, but…)
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I have a few new things to lay on the kids this year when we read The Outsiders. I found a groovy audio file that demonstrates the use of the word dig as a slang term. It comes from an old vinyl record called How to Speak Hip, and although it came out in 1959 (about 8 years before The Outsiders is set), it is still a very groovy way to show the kids how versatile and expressive the word dig is to Pony and the rest. The Meaning of the Word “Dig” So now I’m going to combine this with the poem “Motto” by Langston Hughes (that I already use as one of the intro pieces for The Outsiders), and then I’ll be busting a new let’s-see-how-they-write-at-the-beginning-of-the-year assignment on them. Go here for that. I also added a few new outside links to the Outsiders page. One is to the primetime TV lineup for 1967, another goes to the top music of the time, and another gives some good pop culture and technology references.
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(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]
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That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)