Missing Work

As the clock is ticking down to the end of the year. I have been having more and more students coming up to me asking about their missing assignments, or if there is extra credit for them to do. I often give them a list of their missing assignments and ask them why they didn’t turn them in in the first place.  Common responses are “I was absent”, “You didn’t give it to me.” and “I don’t know…” Some students have legitimate excuses, however the majority of the students who ask for their missing assignments are students that have very low grades and now that its going to count on their report card they want to redeem themselves. I will give them their assignments and take off the usual 30% late fee, however it frustrates me when over the course of the semester I was always trying to keep these students on task. Constantly getting push back from them about doing their work and at the end of the year when it counts, they all of a sudden want to be your best friend so that you can help them pass the class.  I will give them the opportunity to turn in their late work, however they know that they earn their grade and it is not a given by the teacher.

Turning American History into a Business Class

Over the last couple of days I’ve turned my history 1 class in to a business class.  As we have been learning about the industrial revolution and tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie, I thought it would be good for my students to get a taste of the business world.  So what I did was have them create their own business plan and then present it to the class.  They had to establish things such as fixed costs, operating costs, and decide whether their company would be vertically or horizontally integrated.  Students were allowed to be creative while making their corporations and product.  We took the last couple days to present and most of the students had a good time critiquing and questions other groups business plans and products. Overall I thought that the lesson was successful. My students got an opportunity to be creative as well as interact with the class by presenting, finding stockholders and making contracts with other companies.  I don’t know if the world is ready for some of their produces but I’m sure I have a few future tycoons in those classes.

Call of Duty: Black Ops…..

Alright so I’ve been teaching the cold war for the last couple of weeks. We started with the post World War II iron curtain then progressed to the Korean War, Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis and now we are learning about the Vietnam War.  Now as we have been learning about these events I am constantly hearing remarks from some of my students such as “hey this is in Black Ops!” This is a reference to the Call of Duty game, Black Ops.  A game that is set during the Cold War era, the first couple missions deal with events such as the Bay of Pigs and Fidel Castro.  Eventually the protagonist enters the Vietnam War, fighting the in jungles and in battles such as Khen San and the Tet Offensive.  Now I must admit, I own this video game and when students reference it I instantly know what they are talking about.  The storyline of the video game does not limit itself strictly to historical events, it rather goes in and out of historical events and a fictional plot.  

            Many of the students who have played Black Ops express interest in the subject and the events.  The video game is not entirely historically accurate however; students who have played it come into class with prior knowledge of the subject and ask questions making connections between the game and historical facts.  I think that there is value in video games that touch on or are based on historical events.  Students may not fully understand the history however what these games do is plant the seed.  Students are able to gain some basic background knowledge of the event and bring it into the class.  Although the game is violent and contains graphic material it has educational value in my classroom due to some of the discussions that it has created.  We have a couple more days left covering the Vietnam War, it will be interesting to see what kind of discussions if any will come from the game.  

Finding a Rhythm

The hardest part for me so far this semester has been finding a rhythm…Finding a teaching style or strategy that fits with my students and their learning abilities.  Every chapter I have done I have approached slightly different to try and pick up the strengths and weaknesses that my students have.  One of the main areas that I have been working on is having them articulate their answers in written form.  Right now I believe that my class is about split down the middle with students who are good at writing their answers and students who really struggle with it.  Initially it was really hard for most of my students because they weren’t used to so much writing, however now they have gotten used to it.  Every day they come in and write a paragraph or two responding to a journal prompt.  This is to help them practice this skill.  I try and grade these journals frequently but since they are hand written it often takes me along time.  But it is important for them to get feedback about the quality of their writing so they know where they need to improve. 

            Most of my tests are split about 50/50 between multiple choice and short answer.  Some of the problems that I have run into with doing this is that my students who are on IEPs and 504s often do extremely poorly on the short answer even though they are allowed their accommodations and notes.   The other obstacle I run into is that it takes me longer to grade the test than if they are all multiple choice.  This means that the students don’t get their tests back immediately.  But with the short answer I am confident that the students understand the material and aren’t just guessing.  This has been one of my big struggles this semester and I know it’s going to continue to the end of the school year.  

Sickness…..

 

Alright so I’ve never really been one of those people who gets sick that often…. But these last few weeks have been killing me.  Before I started at the High School I prided myself on not have taken a single sick day since I’ve been teaching and that includes the year I taught in Honduras.  I’ve had kids cough and sneeze on me, I haven’t been thrown up on, but there have been some close calls.  But not until now have I been plagued by bad luck. These last few weeks I have been battling something.  The problem is that normally if I don’t feel well I can kind of cover it, but lately I’ve been losing my voice which makes me absolutely useless. I have to completely change my lessons so that they aren’t as labor intensive for me and require the students to be more independent.  It’s good in some aspects because I just have to be flexible and think on the fly but in reality it sucks because I’m sick.  We just need the weather to get warmer that will solve all of our problems.

Citizen, Soldier, Political/Military Leader….What are you?

I recently finished this two part project with my class for our unit on World War II. Now in my mind a good project is one that is perfectly planned, the task is clear, a rubric has been laid out and the students know what is expected of them.  I normally avoid large projects because of those very reasons as well as I know how valuable time is in the classroom. Up until this point I have always been worried that I was going to get behind in the overall curriculum as well as I wouldn’t be organized enough for the students to produce a quality product.  I figured I’ll never know how it’s going to work out unless I just go for it and see what happens.  

            The project I created was based around assigning each group a country then they would study the war from their country’s perspective.  The project was broken up into a group project and an individual project.  As a group they would research and present the major events in the war that affected their country.  The second part of the project was individual.  Within each group every member would be assigned a role or character in which they would create a journal from their characters perspective about the war.  The three stock characters that I gave every group was “citizen”, “soldier”, or “political/military leader”.  The students would create a back story and character to follow through the war.  It took a lot of time for them to research and present but for the most part I think it was a successful lesson.   

            We just finished their presentations and I am still grading their journals.  Some of the students got really into it.  I have one student who wrote his journal from the perspective of a Russian sniper and he shot his journal with his .22 and put some fake blood on it and wrote about how he was shot in the leg during the battle of Stalingrad.  It is pretty awesome.  It was a fun project but not all of them were as creative as that one.  I would do a lot of things differently if I was to do this assignment again, but all in all I had a good time with it.  

Olympics!!!!!!!!

We have been studying European history for the last few weeks and to wrap up our unit on Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great and Ancient Rome we had a miniature Olympic games in my class.  Over the course of the unit students had been put into groups that were called city-states.  Each city-state was assigned a name from an actual ancient city-state, like Thebes, or Corinth as well as a god or goddess.  Over the course of the unit they would work together in their city-state on various assignments as well as they all made a banner for their own city-state that had their name and their god or goddess that they were assigned.

On the day of the Olympics I had all of the different groups send a representative with the banner to me.  Once I got all of the different groups and their banners I had them march in single file holding up their banner that represented their city-state while I played the anthem to the olympics in the background.  I then had a torch made out of construction paper and tissue paper that each representative passed from one to another.  After we had our opening ceremony the different groups competed in two different games. After both games were finished I wrote down who got first, second and third. We then had a brief medals ceremony in which the groups who received second and third received candy and the group that received first was awarded candy and a little plastic gold medal.  It was a great day and the students had a lot of fun competing against one another.