It's a rainy Monday as the last 8 weeks of my teaching career begins. The 8th grade is debating environmental issues and showing me what environmental confusions I should focus on for the last few weeks, e.g. littering and its relationship to global warming. The 7th grade is considering disasters and if there is anything to prophesies about world ending events happening on Dec.21, 2012. The 6th grade has packed up their science fair projects, taken them home, and launch into the study of the solar system combined with learning about Newton, gravity, and the laws of motion. The big ideas here are: 8th grade - environmental issues usually have at least 2 sides and multiple issues involved, 7th grade - the world is a fragile changing system in a much bigger universe and we need to understand it and take responsibility for the parts we can affect, and 6th grade - the solar system is held together by certain fundamental laws and is both big in relation to Earth and small in relation to the universe and filled with many mysteries.
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Rainy mornings seem to sap everyone's motivation. My wife and I were counting class days over breakfast this morning like kids counting the days until Christmas. I have 4 weeks until spring break and then a couple of weeks before final exam preparation begins. Time to focus and stop these "what's the point" thoughts that creep into my consciousness. The right spark in the right place can make the difference.
I just read some of my first blogs (particularly Neeharika's email in "What's the Point"). I don't control enough of this school to make a significant difference in the daily experience beyond a 45 minute science class. A school rule has teachers policing students speaking Spanish during breaks and lunch. If students are caught speaking Spanish they can get a detention. (I give them a chance to write an essay or lose team points.) It puts a weird atmosphere on recess duty, though. The goal is understandable but the method to try to acheive the goal has some sad consequences. The students shift to English when they see a teacher coming. I feel a little like Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes. Whenever I get near, the look-out shouts the warning and they fold up all their escape plans.
I'm not sure why I took that little detour in this blog except I'm struggling with this idea that the whole school experience needs to have an overall beneficial effect on the attitude of the student and something like enforcing a rule like speak English on campus can end up undermining efforts to make the academic activities motivating and engaging. I think I read a book once a long time ago on the importance of the "hidden curriculum".
It's thirty minutes to game time. Shoes laced. The old guy needs to check that all zippers and buttons are fastened and no extremely unsightly nose or ear hair is showing. Computers are on, PowerPoint is loaded, and hand-outs ready. Game on.
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