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xiphiasSome of you may remember that I spent much of the summer working out a timeline of Jewish history, starting at 1000 BCE and going to modern day, which I hung up on the wall of my classroom and was to use as a major part of how I was going to teach the class this year.
It was thirty feet long, a hundred years to the foot. It was in two fifteen-foot sections, taped along an entire wall of the classroom.
It's gone.
Over the high holidays, my classroom was used for daycare, and someone took down the timeline, and it hasn't been found. Far as we can figure, someone threw it out.
Now that I think about it, I'm actually pretty angry about this. I spend many, many hours on that timeline, and it was going to be the fundamental tool which I was going to use this year. And it's GONE.
I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I'm going to have to redo the whole thing. It sucks.
On the other hand, I'm a damn fine teacher.
So, my co-teacher this year is Larry Rich, who has two sons, Adam and Teo (as a baby, he couldn't say "Theo", and the name stuck) who help out as madrachim ("guides", a term for student teachers in Hebrew schools). He's covering the Hebrew portion, mainly, while I'm covering Jewish History. I presume that, once he gets a better idea of relative skill levels, he'll divide the class into two halves and he'll, probably, take the more advanced half.
That's what I'd suggest, anyway. Because I'm a better disciplinarian.
I don't think of myself as one -- but I am. The students, on the whole, appreciate it -- as long as they have to be in class, they'd prefer to get something out of it, and they're willing to let me ride herd on them so long as I ride herd on everyone else. If they actually were not even going to try to learn anything, then, sure, goofing off would be cool -- but if they're going to try to learn something, they want to have an outside chance of success, even if I have to force it on them.
That previous paragraph seems to be absolute gibberish, but I suspect that those of you who are parents, teachers, and/or child psychologists (and, come to think of it, I think that's pretty damn close to a majority) will recognize some of it as possibly true.
So it was frustrating watching Larry trying to cajole the class into behaving, because That Trick Never Works. At a couple points, some of the students turned to me and said, "Ian, use your Teacher Voice!"
So I did a couple times. Worked somewhat okay.
For my half of class, though, I handed out notebooks and pencils and told them, "Okay, you've got these notebooks for two reasons. If you are left-handed, I want you to take notes on the left-hand page. If you are right-handed, I want you to take notes on the right-hand page. On the OTHER page, you are to doodle. Because I know I listen better when I'm doodling, so I want to see if that's true of you, too."
Seems to have worked. We'll see how much they retained, but they were at least apparently attentive, and, even if they weren't, they weren't disruptive.
It was thirty feet long, a hundred years to the foot. It was in two fifteen-foot sections, taped along an entire wall of the classroom.
It's gone.
Over the high holidays, my classroom was used for daycare, and someone took down the timeline, and it hasn't been found. Far as we can figure, someone threw it out.
Now that I think about it, I'm actually pretty angry about this. I spend many, many hours on that timeline, and it was going to be the fundamental tool which I was going to use this year. And it's GONE.
I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I'm going to have to redo the whole thing. It sucks.
On the other hand, I'm a damn fine teacher.
So, my co-teacher this year is Larry Rich, who has two sons, Adam and Teo (as a baby, he couldn't say "Theo", and the name stuck) who help out as madrachim ("guides", a term for student teachers in Hebrew schools). He's covering the Hebrew portion, mainly, while I'm covering Jewish History. I presume that, once he gets a better idea of relative skill levels, he'll divide the class into two halves and he'll, probably, take the more advanced half.
That's what I'd suggest, anyway. Because I'm a better disciplinarian.
I don't think of myself as one -- but I am. The students, on the whole, appreciate it -- as long as they have to be in class, they'd prefer to get something out of it, and they're willing to let me ride herd on them so long as I ride herd on everyone else. If they actually were not even going to try to learn anything, then, sure, goofing off would be cool -- but if they're going to try to learn something, they want to have an outside chance of success, even if I have to force it on them.
That previous paragraph seems to be absolute gibberish, but I suspect that those of you who are parents, teachers, and/or child psychologists (and, come to think of it, I think that's pretty damn close to a majority) will recognize some of it as possibly true.
So it was frustrating watching Larry trying to cajole the class into behaving, because That Trick Never Works. At a couple points, some of the students turned to me and said, "Ian, use your Teacher Voice!"
So I did a couple times. Worked somewhat okay.
For my half of class, though, I handed out notebooks and pencils and told them, "Okay, you've got these notebooks for two reasons. If you are left-handed, I want you to take notes on the left-hand page. If you are right-handed, I want you to take notes on the right-hand page. On the OTHER page, you are to doodle. Because I know I listen better when I'm doodling, so I want to see if that's true of you, too."
Seems to have worked. We'll see how much they retained, but they were at least apparently attentive, and, even if they weren't, they weren't disruptive.