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.