Azinger Again

Let’s drive to Brighton for the weekend.  That’s what I need.  I need to get out of here for awhile.  I need to go somewhere.  Get out of Dodge.  Somehow, I have been trained to appreciate leaving town.  Maybe it’s a result of traveling a lot as a kid, or yearly moves in college, or post college travels around the midwest and world–I don’t know.  But right now, save for a few day trips here and there, we’re going on 12 weeks of waking up in the same place every day.  I have friends that never think twice about this–they go on one week of vacation to Florida every summer, and otherwise are almost always at home.  It’s so nice, so stable and comfortable, but I just can’t get there.  I want to wake up to different scenery and take a walk somewhere I haven’t walked a hundred times already.  Just for a couple of days–just long enough to get in a different frame of mind, a different schedule.  A kiss of escape.

Surely this is compounded by the end of the quarter grades being due (yikes.) and the end of the semester project coming up quickly, but getting so enveloped in work in the fall, I forget about the rest of the world and I guess I get a little but boring.  I have been having such fun at school and at school this year, but I get a little sad when I have an easier time analyzing case studies than writing in my blog (pushing rocks in wordpress).  So a trip, then.  Where to?  Of course Washington awaits, but that’s not until Christmas.  Perhaps to Madison to visit friends?  Who knows, but when it happens, hopefully I will return and my blog will gush with creativity, fresh ideas, and flow.

Before I get all arty, though, I am excited to begin the final pieces on my evaluation project.  Though I still don’t think that I understand all that goes into creating an evaluation (nor should I after just one class) I feel that I have a much much better idea and investment.  Creation is always tough for me–but having created a program that I hope becomes amazing has helped motivate my vision and design.

Yet, implementation and financial responsibility is a grey area for me.  This whole time, I have figured that in my evaluation, myself and one other teacher would be collating the data, conducting the interviews, and implementing changes into our program.  I guess I’m looking at it like another prep, another set of meetings after school–will I need to hire someone?  Can I really expect to get money from the district for this?  I don’t know just yet.  I am slowly moving to the consciously unaware stage right now, and it makes me worry that I am going to get overwhelmed over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve pretty much been keeping up every week, so my final project still requires revision of my first three sections, creation and revision of my final two sections and a presentation idea.  I am hopeing to come up wihth something other that a powerpoint, but I don’t know how well an interpretive dance can be presented over elluminate.  A rap song perhaps?  a collage? I’ll figure something out.  I am very excited for the next couple of weeks, though, to have quarter grades behind us, and a couple of weeks to focus on my project!

Hope everyone is having a great fall and thanks for reading!

I’m not sure if I haven’t been paying attention over the last few years, but Autumn is way better than I ever remember.  Are the leaves more brilliant than before?  Has there always been sweet corn at Klein’s until the middle of October?  Are there aways this many amazingly beautiful days?  Something about this year finds me consistently asking my wife to grab the baby and come look at a tree that has turned bright red, or a, well, yeah basically just a nice looking tree. You know, though, even when it get’s freezing cold and the leaves turn right to brown and drop off over a weekend, I still love autumn.  The frantic, sweaty, laziness of summer is gone, Halloween and Thanksgiving are snowily wonderful winter are lined right on up.

Despite my tree hugging love of fall, I can’t help but feel a little boring (when I was first in Japan, I was trying to explain that something was boring–though when I looked in the dictionary I chose the first definition of boring, which meant ‘making a hole’.  You can imagine the looks on the faces of my colleagues as I mentioned that Gone in 60 Seconds created an actual hole through my body).  No no, the boring I feel now is mostly related to being a teacher.  The excitement of the year has worn down, the kids are getting tired of getting up at 5:30, and I am feeling that the last tendrils of summer have dried up and broken off leaving me in the middle of a routine surrounded by essays and state standards.  This happens every year, and it’s not really bad, it just reminds me of habit.   This year, though, I am really excited to be planning curriculum with a colleague.  We have very similar ideas about education and what is good for our kids–so it’s wonderful working together.

This week, when we planned our surveys, I had a similar experience.  I realized that, as a participant, closed surveys are great–I fill in some bubbles, check some boxes, make a short comment, and I’m merrily on my way.  Making these surveys–not so much.  They weren’t just routine or boring–there were no tendrils to be seen.  Instead, they became like an English teacher’s nightmare:  I was there–shackled to a chair while yes, no, agree, and disagree all beat me with empty boxes and check marks.  Never again would I be able to ask why?  or write “please explain” when discussing writing and reading.  My brow was damp, my pulse was high; I was skittish, nervous, jumpy.  Then, like deux ex machina in a young adult lit, I was pulled out of my terrifying alternative universe and told that these closed questions weren’t all that bad.  I could use certain patterns in these questions to find out why certain students chose the answers they did.  I could get more than just blank data, but data that could really help me make positive changes in my program.  That was really great to find out.

This week, I also liked being paired with the same partner from last week.  It’s nice to dedicate focus on one person’s work sometimes!

My plan for a relaxing, beautiful, Sunday afternoon in the fall ended up being a ridiculous exercise in rhetoric.  I won’t bore anyone with details, but having had to watch a beautiful day pass by through an open window should be punishable by law.  The police should have come to my house, knocked down my door, and dragged my butt outside.  While Ryoko and Seijiro did spend most of the day outside, I was able to join them in the  evening.  Spending time with them was better than using bailout money to take all of my friends to a spa.  Oops, I mean, it was better than abusing my power as governor, wait a sec–how did I segue from enjoying my day as a husband and father to political sarcasm?  A reflection of my day, perhaps?  Today’s theme?  Who knows.  I do know that I look so forward to this blog assignment every week and am aggravated that today I have squandered my creative energy on an unneccesary task.

To address the assignment at hand: the process of designing an interview guide was really good, actually.  I loved working hard to make sure that my interview questions would tie directly into my key questions.  ut in order to do that, I had to go back and make sure I understood why my key quesitons were important, and how I wanted to use them to learn.  Since I am basing this off of what I am actually doing this year, I was forced further to think about why I was doing this, and how Moodle really could help my students.  All this forcing and thinking was good for me this week.  It helped glue some things together, making me more confident in my choice of evaluation subject.

The interview itself was a little more challenging.  I had a wonderful partner, and we both read up on each other, looking at introductions and evaluation plans prior to the interview.  When it came down to it, though, it was hard for both of us to come up with answers to each other’s questions.  I feel like this is a cop-out, like when my kids come to me and say, “I didn’t understand so I didn’t do it.”  As a teacher, that drives me more crazy than a whole lot of things.  But I tried to be very deliberate in creating questions that would yield the data I needed to make sure that I was doing a good thing in my class.  Likewise with my partner.  Having had no experience with SRSs, I couldn’t think of very many uses for them outside of multiple choice type questions, and therefore had a very limited range of responses to his questions.  I struggled to think of how they would help learning because I was so preoccupied with trying to fit them into my class. What would have helped me was if part of our assignment working together would’ve included a brief summary of  anticipated responses sent from my partner before the interview.

We both really wanted to work together, though, so we decided to share our questions in full.  By doing that, I was not only able to have a better understanding of what Dave was trying to get from his interviewees, I was also able to offer better advice and support for the questions he was writing.  I feel that he did the same for me.

While we weren’t able to contribute data to one another’s research, we were able to contribute a lot to the question design.  As outsiders without preconceived ideas of what the answers should be, we were able to offer a neutral perspective on how questions might be perceived.  We played around with potential answers and worked through the answers of various subgroups, wording our questions to be more inclusive.

In the end, it was a very helpful session, and it was great to spend time with a classmate, one-to-one.  And I can’t wait until next Sunday night, where hopefully my mind will be fresher and I will once again have the creative energy to enjoy the fun that this assignment always provides.  Good night.

I have a bad habit.  Or maybe not so much of a habit as an estimation-impairment.  OK, that’s not really the best way to describe it.  It’s like, well, sometimes, my parents, seeing me as a child loading my plate with tons of food that they knew I’d never finish, would comment that my “eyes were bigger than my stomach.”  I would try to prove them wrong, but to no avail.  They were right, I had no idea how much was really appropriate for my hunger and the size of my body.

I still do that–but not with food.  I get so excited about having a baby that I fail to think about how much work it’s going to be and get swamped with unpreparedness.  Or I am so excited to try a new lesson idea or activity failing to understand how much work it is actually going to take and spend hours rushing to finish everything in time.  (I do it the other way around too, like panicking about how hard it is going to be to drive to Milwaukee to see a show at the Pabst–where is it, where will we park, how long will it take, etc–when in actuality it’s easy as pie.  Or taking the baby to the apple orchard (all that talk two weeks ago made me want to go so badly ) with us this year and having a great time despite my panic and apprehension before leaving.)

This week was one of those times.  I never felt that it would be easy, but I have been thinking about my ‘hypothetical’ evaluation pretty consistently over the past month or so for two reasons: this class; my own classes at SEHS.  I am trying to integrate Moodle into my classes even as I write this, and therefore am trying to plan this evaluation in concert with what how I want this to work.  I have a lot of ownership here, so I figured that three questions I want answered should be no sweat.  And I guess they wouldn’t have been if I only had three questions, but I don’t.  I have a hundred questions.  I’ve never done this before.  I’ve got no background.  I’ve got no history. I don’t know where this is going to go or if it’s going to work.  Patrick saw right what I was doing, and asked if I “want there what [I] have here” at CTER.  Yes I do!  I love what we have here, and I want to emulate it as much as I can, but I have only been doing this for 8 months now, though never once in the exact capacity that I am doing with my students.  I’d like to think I’m pretty good at synthesizing information, but there’s no question that I have no place thinking that I know how to do this well.

So, thinking of the three questions that could really nail the marrow of what I want to happen in my classes was hard.  I came up with the following:

1. How has an authentic audience of peers and a greater focus on writing in class affected student writing?

Really, thinking back over the summer classes, I have wanted to make sure that I use technology only that will help enhance learning for my students.  I think that Moodle is one of those tools.  I’ve written about this a hundred times I’m sure, but I am constantly trying to find a way for my kids to get their writing out to more than just me.  When kids don’t like writing anyway, asking them to do a bunch of it for a one ma audience is hardly motivating.  I’m sure that my teaching style would be VERY different if I only had one student per class a day.  (yes, I’d love it, but I think the point I am trying to make is that I would not be nearly as worried about making mistakes and having everything polished off, as long as I had a decent relationship with the student.)  Anyway, asking students to post their work, never knowing who from their class is going to read it should have a positive effect on their motivations.

2. How has Moodle affected students’ ability to work, think, and discuss independently; does it prepare students to apply their knowledge to the classroom?

My pre-AP students are not very responsible right now.  Printers are breaking left and right, computers are getting viruses on a daily basis, and folders are being left on kitchen tables at an alarming rate.  I need my kids to get past that for a lot of reasons, and I think that this could be a good way to do it.  Everything is there–no loops, no surprises.  The kids will have plenty of advance notice that assignments are due, and they will have plenty of individual time to do them.  I want to see how much of a difference this makes on their levels of responsibility.  Also I want to see if they can learn to apply their knowledge to their writing that they do in class–this is just bonus goodness.

3. Have the occasional foibles of technology been offset by the advantages for students and teachers?

As Jennifer has already experienced, and I am dealing with a bit, there are plenty of issues when using high tech in junior and senior high schools.  It’s a new way of working and therefore will cause some problems as all new programs do.  But, once the kinks are ironed out and the results are in, will it even matter that 3 students took 4 months to get their accounts on Moodle?  Hopefully not.