Progress With The Seminar

Lately, as I read the newspaper (yes, I still read the newsPAPER as well as the online versions), I patrol for articles that my seminar students might find interesting. For example, Enrique is pursuing food, so I "dished-up" an food review by the Inquirer critic Craig Leban. Since fashion is Turquoise's passion, I adorned one of my comments responses with an article about Barbie and fashion from the magazine section of the paper. Other students have received articles related to civil engineering, smart prosthetics, cochlear implants, and rehabilitating our oceans. (If you are reading this blog gentle students, and you're wondering why Mr. Abrams hasn't sent you an article link, just you wait. I started doing this recently)

I haven't set a deadline for the research paper yet because, gasp, I want the students for now to get into the habit of blogging and journaling on a daily basis. Most of what they reflect about should have to do with their project theme, along with personal and professional development stuff.

For the next week, class, I want you to start concretizing a research paper topic that is narrow, but not too narrow, and provable, and I hope that deliberately looking at newspapers and magazines will "prime the pump." One article could be the beginning of several weeks of invigorating research. Save the articles in a folder - you may print them out or keep them in a SAFE digital place (U Drive). Make sure you have the author's name, the date of the article, and the name of the publication.

Hit the public libraries and our own library to find books related to your topic! Keep thinking, collecting, making the connections, and making yourselves smart!

Vocabulary that Sticks! There is no "n" between the "i" and the "c."

Vocabulary and all of its incarnations are my passion. I remember as a boy how I would flip through a thesaurus and be enchanted by all the different synonyms for different words. Why say "dog" when I could use jewels like hound, pooch, canine, mutt, cur, and bitch?

When I first started teaching, I would give my class a canned list of SAT-style vocabulary words - words which came from chipper worksheets that I dutifully copied, and I expected the students to know how to define them at the end of the week, perhaps even use them in sensible ways. Of course, I used them in context as best I could, but at the end of the week, it was "pump and dump" on the quizzes, then the words would be abandoned. They didn't stick.

Today I have the Smartboard, a magical tool that has enabled me to take vocabulary study several levels higher. First, the students find "Words in the Wild." From reading newspapers and magazines, they bring me cool, advanced words that they have never used before. Most of the time, these words would fit on any SAT study list.

Next we define the words and understand the part of speech for each words.

Now I'll tell the students to create a complex or compound sentence that clearly uses the word in context. And the kicker...

I've modeled for students how to find an online image that portrays the word.




Today, I invited students to put their fingers on the Smartboard, and smiled as they attacked the creative, open-endedness of it all. As a class we made slides that featured the word, it's definition, a great sentence featuring the word in context, and an image that conjures the word. The sky is the limit!

I like this approach because I made it up after synthesize my best practices and what I've seen other teachers do. While it probably makes more work for me- no matching or fill in's at the end of the week - I hope the students get more our of it and learn to love and use vocabulary in creative ways.

I wonder what the character "V," the word lover extraordinaire, from the movie V for Vendetta would say? Visciously vital vocabualy victoriously vaunts over other versions!

Do full moons make students and teachers nuts?

Are lunatics really influenced by lunar occurrences?

Is it an old wife's tale that some people get very agitated during the times of a full moon? Can the moon really affect our moods? As a teacher, I've really started thinking about it because we work in relatively small locations jam-packed with humanity, like few other places, and yes, there was a full moon last night like I've never seen.

Today I've noticed a palpable frenzied energy field in the hallways that didn't exist last week. Some of the kids seem much more rammy, and the loud students really shout and yell.

Should I be sensitive to the rhythms of the moon in planning my lessons?

Want to read more? Check out the link! http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124301&page=1

IS TECHNOLOGY MAKING US DUMB AND LAZY?

Cindy wrote in her blog about how how her parents lament the fact that technology seems to spoil young people today, that somehow teens lose the ability to think when information is thrown right into their laps. As a teacher, I think about this all the time.
Yes, I remember having to get most of my knowledge from books and encyclopedias. My parents bought me a set of red covered Junior Britannicas, and I used them all through middle and high school. It took me TIME to find information. Today, I can get the answers to practically anything in seconds; an impossible amount of knowledge is a keystroke or two away.
Technology will dumb us down if we let it, I suppose. But I truly think that technology is a boon to education. My daughter who is in the 6th grade is very tech-savvy, and I know that if she were beamed back to 1979, right now, she would flourish and adapt, as many of my students would flourish.
It all boils down to work ethic and passion for education. Those students who have both, and leaven it with healthy doses of reading will always do well.

SATs and "The Top Dogs"

http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20090205/NEWS01/902050350

I just stumbled across the above article in the Courier Post. It reported that Haddonfield, Moorestown, and Cherry Hill East have the highest SATs in tri-county area. Haddonfield weighs in at 1726, and Shawnee, Medford, and Eastern are in that elite club of the top ten. So what makes a school fortunate enough to be inhabited by so many over achievers who perform well on the be-all and end-all of standardized tests? Do these schools have better educational systems? Are their curricula more rigorous? Do they have better libraries and more extraordinary technology? Are the teachers more engaging and better trained? I honestly don't think so.

Our students at Lindenwold are every bit as intelligent and dynamic as the students at Moorestown or Cherry Hill. On this note, we can't rest until we inspire our students devour their studies with a kind of religious fervor, until they all become addicted to becoming their own best teachers, and even after this happens, we can't rest.

I keep thinking of Abraham Lincoln, and how he intrinsically revered education.

Recently, I've noticed more students focused on their studies. More seem to come to class prepared. There is more focus and I see more hands going up. Does the election of President Obama have anything to do with it? Is this the stuff that fuels the SAT scores that are catnip for admissions officers? What can I do as a teacher to help equalize those SAT scores? Am I being quixotic or am I for real?

How is Shakespeare Hip Hop?

Lately, I've been thinking about how to help my ENG 10 students realize that Shakespeare's work and hip-hop are one and the same. Hip hop embodies the artistic, and usually verbal, portrayal of raw human emotions (love, hate, anger, envy, passion) into stylish songs and raps that often have contageous beats. Hip-hop also employs puns, irony, rhyme, sarcasm, paralipsis, iambic pentameter, and drama to convey messages.



I found some nice clips from Youtube that back up my contention.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec_pDV07pQg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H2htG2bv20&feature=related

I don't mean to mar my blog with a direct quote from Wikepedia, but here goes:
Origin of the term of Hip Hop
Coinage of the term hip hop is often credited to Keith Cowboy, a rapper with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.[3] Though Lovebug Starski, Keith Cowboy, and DJ Hollywood used the term when the music was still known as disco rap, it is believed that Cowboy created the term while teasing a friend who had just joined the U.S. Army, by scat singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers.[3] Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into a part of his stage performance, which was quickly copied by other artists; for example the opening of the song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang.

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I hear big-time iambs in the following sequence of words:

hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop


Wait a second! Did I just write some iambic pentameter? Time to replace those hips and hops!

A Streetcar Named Desire gives me a lightbulb moment!

I had the pleasure to see A Streetcar Named Desire last night at the Walnut Street Theater, a Philadelphia institution that celebrates its 200th birthday today. Nearly every instant of the production pulsated with electricity, and this show pulled me in to the point where I felt both emotionally connected and repulsed by the characters.

Somewhere on the way home it hit me. There is another way to help solved the so called education crisis in this country...

Hire and train out-of-work actors to be teachers! Actors are inherently creative risk takers who need to be articulate. They need to work well on teams, improvise, and inspire - all skills required in a good teacher's repertoire. It seems to me that hundreds of thousands trained actors are waiting tables, and waiting for that big break that statistically will never come. Why not start a marketing campaign to recruit them and fast track their qualifications so that they can start teaching students who desperately need them?

The organization Teach for America recruits graduates from the best colleges to work in tough- to-fill schools. Why not go after the actors just as zealously? After all, there will always be talented people to play the gorilla-like Stanley Kowalski and the faded, tragic Blanche DuBois.