Awesome Failure

Serve up your slice on Tuesdays
with Two Writing Teachers

December brings Project for Awesome. 

Always December 17^th, the Project for Awesome is an annual YouTube event.  Thousands of video creators participate by making videos in support of their favorite charities. Anyone can make a video and anyone can participate in the commenting, tweeting and donating fun.

I wrote a bit about how you can participate in the project on the Nerdy Book Club this past week and will talk about it on Engchat on Twitter next Monday. This week in my classroom is all about getting our videos planned, created and published. 

It's Tuesday and already I have to swap out my own ideas. See I had this idea. Sort of like Kristina Horner's 2007 Nerdfightastic mission to spread the word about Nerdfighteria, libraries and First Book. Instead of decorating index cards and inserting them into library books, I thought I could spread the word about organizations that serve the hungry in our community by sticking labels on canned goods at the store. 

I made labels. I did think alouds for my students. I got excited about the mission. I talked through ideas for filming. I was ready to roll when I thought about asking permission. Teaching is a subversive act, but I decided to ask the manager of the store if it was okay, just to make sure. 

Did you know that sticking stickers on items that are for sale in a commercial establishment is considered solicitation? Indeed it is, by more than one grocery store manager. So,  back to the drawing board. Failure means I've learned something. Failure means I revise and (cue the movie music) "keep moving forward."

 If an idea  fails there must be a better one on the horizon.

I want to highlight organizations that feed people and provide food. That's the idea I've been modeling as we gather facts, storyboard and write drafts of scripts.  I want to create a sample Project for Awesome video with things close at hand to show my students that we don't have to be in another country or working at an organization to make a difference. If we do what we can, that counts too. 

Don't get me wrong. I hope I'm raising students to work with the poor. I hope I am raising students to care about developing countries and fight for access to clean water and an end to Malaria and education for all, especially girls. Those pursuits are amazing and wonderful and terrifically needed, but your everyday ninth-grader is stunned by them and fears he will never live up to such amazing deeds. I want to give my students a  starting place. 

I want to teach them to take one step in the right direction. 

Eye level shot of the pantry.

So, my revised idea? Photograph food. Photograph what is in my pantry and or my refrigerator. Photograph what is on the shelves at the grocery store (the manager said that was okay). Beg my friends and followers for photographs of the food at their houses. Piece the images together into a montage and use them to talk about the food we have and the food others need. Highlight the food organization  I will support (I'm choosing between a local pantry and a meta-pantry such as Second Harvest) and close my video with ways anyone can donate or pitch in. What do you think? 

You'd think we don't eat vegetables, but we do.

Will you send me a picture of the food in your pantry ? Or the food in your fridge? Don't clean it first. No one will know whose is whose. Really, it's  not about you or your matching containers or alphabetically shelved cans or even the moths in the bread flour. Just try not to get the beer or the wine in the picture. 

Project for Awesome and the videos created for it are about helping people and raising awareness. If you want to help me inspire my students and  help me serve the hungry, send your pictures to spillarke (at) gmail or tweet them to @spillarke. 

Thank you, thank you! 
Lee Ann 

Word of the Day: Philanthropy

I'm changing my bell work routine today. Instead of doing a daily think write (what my students call quick writes), we are doing word study. I'm just shifting it up in my instructional order during the class period. I'm using a new-to-me tool (the Educreations app) to  record, share and distribute the word of the day notes in order to make my teaching more transparent. Recording and sharing the lessons online helps students recover from an absence or a lack of focus in class--it gives them extra time to take notes or review work at home. Many of them need more time than we have in class.

Educreation's work space is essentially a whiteboard where I can import a picture, draw, or type and record audio as I make notes on the screen. It is easy to use, intuitive. A fellow teacher showed me the app. He works as a DJ at a popular Cuban restaurant on the weekends and he showed me a video he made explaining the DJ's soundboard. Very cool.

I like it so far. It is not complicated to use and it allowed me to create, save and share (via Twitter) in under five minutes (even with the web filtering road-block I ran into during the process). Amazing!  

I ran into two snags, none the fault of the program. For some reason, my district server would not allow me to tweet directly from the app or iPad.  I kept getting an error message and being asked to re-log in. When I was denied tweetability, I found a work around quickly by logging on to my Educreations ' profile online on my laptop. I easily tweeted the link from my teacher computer to my classroom tweet stream. This had everything to do with the restructuring and outsourcing of our web filtering process and nothing to do with Educreations.

The only other issue I had was with my ability to multi-task. Sometimes it is difficult for me to think aloud, write, observe students and spell at the same time. As I was talking students through the word I mispelled meanness. I felt it (the misspelling) as I did it. It's tricky to juggle all of those processes at the same time, especially while navigating and using a new-to-you tool in front of a live teenage audience. Still, it became a good talking point to debrief the process.



Happy Wednesday!
Lee Ann

PS: Philanthropy was our word today because it is time for AWESOME! The Project for Awesome begins December 17th. Will you be ready? Get the scoop from the Vlogbrothers.

PSS: Need more awesome? Time Magazine put's John Green's The Fault in Our Stars at the top of the top ten fiction books of 2012!  

Undone

Slice of Life, a Tuesday post, is sponsored by Two Writing Teachers. 

Driving home from the junior varsity basketball game this evening my son, Collin, confessed. He got another "undone." An undone is what students get when they do not turn in an assignment on time. When a student doesn't have his work, the teacher fills out the undone form in triplicate. The white copy goes home for the parents to sign; the teacher keeps the yellow copy and the pink copy, well my son thinks it goes to the principal. The Violent Femmes came to mind as I was driving home: “I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record." It won't. I know that now, but I remember what it felt like to be forgetful.

I wish that Collin remembered every assignment every week and every day, but I'm a realist. People forget things. I forget things.  People forget things that are more important than a signature on a science fair form and more life-altering than a rough draft. Sometimes they even testify to such in a court of law. That does not mean that Collin should not learn to meet deadlines and develop work habits that will help him succeed in high school. He should. 

I get the undone thing. I might not agree with how it's graded and counted, but I appreciate the intent. 

As a parent another thing I appreciate about the undone is the way it gives Collin and opportunity to talk to me. He has to tell me. He either tells and I sign his form so that he can turn in the assignment that he left finished at home on the breakfast table(or in the printer) for a reduced grade or he goes to detention, something I might only learn about when the monthly bill came. Yes, I pay for him to attend a detention. He goes to a private school and parents  pay for detention time but that is another story. Collin always tells, so far anyway. 

It is difficult for him and I admire his bravery every time he faces it. I hated telling my father when I'd done something wrong at school. I hated telling my Mom too, but it was easier to tell her. Collin is on his ninth undone. That seems excessive to me. Does it seem excessive to you? He's in sixth grade. He has seven teachers. He has not gotten nine undones in every class, just nine total. He says he's perhaps in the middle of the undone pack in terms of the other kids in his grade. I'm just curious about undone norms I guess, though I shouldn't compare. We brainstormed solutions and settled on making a checklist for his mirror or the backdoor--something to remind him to think through his needs for the day.

 I appreciated the conversation today's undone engendered.  Collin asked about how teachers at my school handle late work. We often talk about what he's doing in middle school in terms of getting ready for high school. I appreciate that his middle school teachers work as a team. Frankly, sometimes I'm jealous of that unity. At my school teachers have their own undone or late work policies. Those policies range far and wide. Collin asked about what happens in high school when you don't have your work on time. I gave him a list of how some teachers I know handle late work. What happens if you turn in an assignment late at my high school?  

• You get a zero. Some teachers do not accept late work at all [period]. 
• You get a letter grade off.
• You get 1/3 of a letter grade off for each day it is late.
• You get 1/2 credit on the assignment.
• You turn in the work without any points penalty.  
• You can make up the assignment after school for full or partial credit. 
• You have to make up the work but you do not get credit for it.

Those are just the policies I know. We have nearly two hundred teachers at my school. Departments do not have standard late work policies. Sometimes specialty programs like International Baccalaureate or AVID do, but they are not consistently followed by the entire team. Exceptions abound. 

I favor  Rick Wormeli's thinking when it comes to grades and late work. I don't want to demand adult-level competencies from children.  Learning is recursive; our current system is not. When I consider how to handle late work in my classroom, I think about knowledge and behavior. I ask myself if I'm grading what a student knows and is able to do or if  I'm grading a behavior. Then I think about how I can set the student up to learn the behaviors he needs to meet deadlines in the future. Behaviors are learned. I want to develop students' character.  What lesson will set students up to learn not to procrastinate or not to rush out without checking you have what you need? What lesson will help students recover their grade and learn how to meet the deadline the next time? Collin and I talked about those sorts of things during our drive home. 

If a student has more than a couple of undones, I would expect the teacher to talk to the student and the parents. Look into causes. If someone is not doing his work, there must be a problem. It might be a matter of forgetfulness. It might be that the student does not know how to manage his time or his resources as he gets ready for school. The student might be doing their work but not turning it in.  Is the student rushed in the morning or over extended after school with extracurricular activities?   Would a checklist or a planner help? Conversations matter. This kind of procedural learning takes time--we don't have twenty-two years, but we do have today and quite a few tomorrows still. . As Wormeli says, "We're in the world to look out for each other, not to play gotcha."