For starters, having students read the blog post seemed to produce great results. Almost all of them liked the idea of reading my reflection about the day and then getting a preview of what would happen the next day, so I'm going to keep that as the Do Now for every day.
And then, they were all better workers during class! I don't know if it was because of the blog post, but it seemed to set a good tone for the day. It's really tough, because the periods are 1 hour and 55 minutes long, so filling that much time and having students only sitting in their desks is tough. But also, a lot of students said in their questionnaires that they don't like to have to talk in class or work in groups, so having them stand up and do some interactive activity might really make students uncomfortable. But I like how the peer editing is creating interactions through the work.
The peer editing also went more smoothly today, especially since most students finished writing and are into the editing or re-writing phase. Many students finished completely and I was able to give them the short stories to read. That was awesome, but I'm worried that some students are falling behind in the work.
This is my next dilemma - what happens when I'm seeing students work slowly because of technology distractions? Not because they are just sitting there texting or looking at facebook, twitter, instagram, etc - that is only part of it. But also because of the music. I'm watching a lot of students spending many minutes searching for a song, scrolling through search results, looking at comments about songs, and sometimes they will just stop working and be groovin to the beat, but they aren't working. And it doesn't happen all at once - it's like, 1 minute here on music, 1 minute there talking, 1 minute here texting, 3 minutes putting their head down - and so the 20 small breaks that last 1-2 minutes adds up to 30 lost minutes of work. Which is about 33% of their time in class.
And a lot of students say "But Mister, how do you know it's slowing me down?" or "Mister, I work better with music" or "Mister, I'm multi-tasking", but they still aren't getting enough work done quickly. So I'm worried that they will end summer school without passing because they fell more and more each day. This thing happened last year too - 3 or 4 weeks into summer school,many students realized they were so far behind that they stopped coming. I'm worried about that. Should I be more tough with them? Should I just let them be? I think I need some way that students can have a daily checklist of things they need to get done, so they can see if they are falling behind in their work.
Anyway, this isn't all the students. Most of them are completing a lot of work because they really want to pass. And I'm going to reward the hard working students with more than a silly 65 grade - mad students are going to earn 80s and 90s if they keep working as hard as they are.
For tomorrow, I have several groups of students who are coming in:
1) Students who are still in the editing and re-writing phase for their pimple story.
2) Students who are in the middle of reading and analyzing the two short stories ("Harrison Burgeron" and "Girl")
3) Students who are now moving on to the autobiographical short story assignment.
So here's my general idea for tomorrow:
Do now: Read the blog post and write a comment (10 minutes)
I explain to students that they need to get through the 2 short stories and then write their autobiographical short story by the end of the day. Then we will actually go over the peer editing form (I didn't do it today again because of the latenesses), where I explain why they need to fill out each part of the form (they are going to be writing about the stories using their answers from the peer editing forms for their analysis). This should take about 10 minutes.
Then they can start working on what they need to get done. As they finish their autobiographical stories, they are going to find 2 people to peer edit them, then revise it while they type it. And if they are done with all that, I'm going to have them make their own blogs.
They are going to use this site (Weebly.com) since I found it so easy to use, and once they make their blog, they are going to be able to post their own short stories and all the other writing they do on the blog. And once everyone has a blog up and running by the end of this week, I'm going to have them write a blog reflection about each class as the end of class activity.
And lastly, if a student finishes their autobiographical short story, gets 2 edits, re-writes it on the computer, AND sets up their blog, then they can move on to Thursday's 2 short stories, which are much longer, but also really good. One of them is called "The Sweetheart of the Song Trabong" and it's about a group of American soldiers in the Vietnam War who manage to fly one of the soldier's girlfriends into their camp and she starts to-- well, I'm not going to ruin it. The other story is called "Wildwood" and it's about a girl who hates her Dominican mother so much, gets depressed in high school, turns goth (she calls it "punk"), and again, I'm not going to ruin it for people who are going to read them.