Day 3: August 28 2009

Picture, if you will, a 23 year old with a degree in history, no previous experience dealing with high schoolers, wearing the same pair of khakis he has worn for the past 3 days. Now imagine that this dubious individual was placed in charge of 127 14-17 year olds who have no real reason to listen to or pay attention to him. I have a lot to unpack today, so bear with me.

I got up in front of the class, and reminded them that Mrs. Blank wasn't there today. I introduced the substitute, and told them that they would be working on the questions in their unit guide. If they didn't have a book, they could borrow one from someone who did. I told them it was okay if they talked.

The results were shocking. In all six classes, students took out their books and started working. A lot of them had problems finding definitions if they weren't in the glossary (a surprising number didn't know to check the index). The first two periods were kind of chatty, and after that I made sure to specify that they had to stay in their seats. And they listened! Even 8th period, who I often joke is my 'problem class,' did a remarkably good job of sitting down and shutting up. 4th period was completely silent. Completely silent. 6th period was the most talkative class, but it gave me a good picture of the classroom dynamics. As I floated around the classroom, I was able to develop a tentative rapport with some of my students. These links are fragile, and easily sundered. Inevitably they probably mean more to me as a teacher-in-training than to the students as teenagers wrapped up in whatever it is the kids are doing these days. And when I come back in January, I might have to rebuild them from scratch.

Day 2: August 27 2009

Today, Mrs. Blank learned (from a 1 AM  phone call)  that she had to attend a funeral on Friday. That meant that the schedule becomes a lot more cramped. The initial plan for the week was to spend today going over the unit guide (which has definitions and questions they're supposed to know for the HSA/AP tests) and syllabus and spend Friday practicing group work and issuing them their books. Now we had to go over the unit guide and pass out books in a single day; which is a lot more complicated than it might seem. For one, 10th graders don't necessarily know how to read a unit guide. It seemed really easy and clearly laid out to me, and Mrs. Blank patiently went over its contents, and still it took a fair amount of time before it seemed like everyone was pretty much on the same page. The AP classes, generally, didn't take as long to catch on, but their Unit Guide was a lot longer and took more time to go over. The second, and more time consuming problem, was that we needed to keep a record of which student received which book, and so they had to be handed out one-by-one.

How does one crowd-control when doing something boring/time consuming like calling students up one-by-one to get their books? Mrs. Blank was originally planning on doing it while they were doing group work, so that the other students would be occupied. But under a time crunch, we decided to show a movie on the history of the dollar bill. In introducing this movie, she warned that some of the claims made in it are controversial, while others were just out-and-out false. The movie was a sensationalist History Channel production which seriously privileges the theory that the dollar bill was part of a Masonic conspiracy. We told the kids that in order to be critical consumers of media, they had to learn to analyze the way things were presented to them. In discussion afterwards, they were clearly able to tell what claims were crazy and which were credible. Good for them.