I decided that I wanted to make blogging a part of my summer school class. I want to have all my students create their own blogs and also participate in my blog. So After each post, I'm going to have them comment on my blog posts as a way of getting feedback about the lessons. So here it goes! Day 1:
I'm not feeling amazing about what happened today. Here's the run down.
In all three classes, I started with the questionnaire below. It went fine, but I expected students to have more to say than they actually did. For example, most of them didn't have questions for me, which I find strange - are they not used to teachers giving them the opportunity to ask questions? Are they nervous? Or have they been trained to not ask questions of their teachers? I'm not sure. Besides that, they were reluctant to name class rules,and when they did, it was very minimal, like,a lot of students said "try to keep it quiet in the room" or "no disrespect", but they did not elaborate on what they meant by disrespect. This was another puzzler for me.
Then I handed out the "write the story of a pimple" assignment shown below. This went better in some classes than others. In all classes,most students understood what to do, and started doing it. But a minority of students were stuck on even starting their story. This is where I did something wrong - I should have gotten all the students who were stuck to sit together, with me, so we could brainstorm how to start a short story. I could have done this, but the other problem was that several students were writing, but then stopping and getting distracted, so I had to keep walking around the room reminding students that if they are off task, their grade goes down.
1) Some students got started on a story, but did not finish.
2) Some students finished writing, but nobody has edited it.
3) Some students have gotten 2 people to edit theirs., but not started typing.
4) Some students have gotten 2 edits and started typing it.
5) And some students have already finished the whole process.
Every student is on a different schedule tomorrow, and some of them are behind where I want them to be. But here's my plan for what to do tomorrow:
Do Now: Have all students who were here on Monday read this blog post and comment on it. While they are doing that, the new students will fill out the questionnaire and then take a look at the short story sheet and start planning theirs. (10 minutes)
When all students have commented on the blog, they each send me an email, so I have their g-mail accounts and can start making them a google doc so they can track their progress in class. (5 minutes)
Then I want to review the peer editing sheet with students so everyone understands each question and that they need to give feedback for each one. (10 minutes)
Then I will turn them loose to finish what they started yesterday. This will be the bulk of class. As they finish, I will have them choose to read one of two short stories- Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"or Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and then doing the peer editing sheet for the story they choose. This should take most of them until the end of class, but if they finish one, I'm going to have them do the other. If you are a person who is completely finished with their story, then the reading and "editing" of the Vonnegut and Kincaid stories might not take the rest of class, so I'm going to have those students start creating their own blogs and then making one entry which will be their pimple story and a reflection on the first two days of summer school.
And if they finish THAT early, then I'm going to give them the autobiographical short story assignment.