7:18

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!

 

Tendril

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!

 

Next Sunday

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.

 

Bigger than my stomach

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.

 

Green Patch

This was a great week–a great week with options. I enjoyed having the opportunity to choose from a variety of ways to illustrate my understanding of a topic.  Being a very visual learner, I couldn’t wait to make a chart, graph, or diagram.  Ironically, however, I was so excited to respond to the third prompt that I went ahead and passed up the chance to visualize my understanding.  Fortunately there were tons of great examples that I could look at and learn from–so that was great.  As for options in assignments, I hope to do that with my own students a lot, though I’m sure I don’t do it often enough.  I’m co-teaching this year, and my hope is that (please please please) my co-teacher and I will eventually get into a rhythm, and we will both start bringing some great ideas.  Until then, I’m working hard, or not (I need the option ) on making more options available to my students in their learning.

Speaking of co-teaching, after three years of asking, I finally was given a co-taught class.  I was very excited and couldn’t wait for all of the collaborative excellence that would be oozing out of our room.  Surely, two teachers with 30 students is like 20 minute brownies in 14 minutes, right?  Surely two professionals planning lessons together would make an MIT think tank envious, right?  Surely a content area expert and a learning styles expert, together, would be a teaching force to be reckoned with, right? (is it ovious that I’m studying parallelism with my students right now?).  All of those dreams of awards and ceremonies and rose bouquets are somewhere down next to a tattered plan book, under some ungraded essays.  It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not what I thought.  There is a gap somewhere that we need to fill before we can begin working full steam, and I’m not sure how to do that.  Add to that that I have been honing my very own unique patented kung-fu teaching style over the last four years, and it makes for a very different experience than I had anticipated.

Thank goodness for AI.  I would not be totally truthful if I said that I hadn’t expressed some frustrations.  I’m sure I still will-there might even be some expletive thrown in a time or two.  But more than anything, I want this to work.  So, starting about a week ago, I began thinking of what elements of our two-periods together were successful.  Focusing on those (one was a wonderful assignment that involved options!) has helped me focus on where we need to go.  And not just looking at the postive things we’ve done, but thinking about how we could become great (keeping the dream alive (blech, pardon the cliche)) and figuring out how to get there, or at least take the steps to start heading in that direction–that has been great for me.  This has been great for me.  I know it’s not formal evaluation, but looking at the general understandings of evaluation on pages 40 and 41 of the Preskill and Catsamas text (Evaluation is for enhancing knowledge and decision making, asking questions about everyday practice, is purposeful, etc.) I can’t help but feel that what I do at the end of most days hits most of these understandings and can be considered some form of evaluation.  With that in mind, applying AI has been super.  Like my co-teaching thing, I can look to the postives to help make my teaching better and be more constructive.

Maybe I’m still green, and maybe the literature we’ve been reading is a little biased, but it seems like AI is really a no-brainer.  It makes so much sense to look at evaluation from the standpoint that AI suggests.  Like a video game patch, or bug-fix, it doesn’t need to be installed.  You can still play with the old patch, and the game only freezes under rare circumstances.  But if you do install the patch, everything runs so much more smoothly, the game rarely ever freezes, and winning is that much easier.

 

Pushing Rocks

I should start carrying a notebook around.  I always seem to get inspired when I’m miles away from my home–usually in the car or on a walk or in an orchard.  Out and away from home, my mind wanders around, ending up in random, exciting places that I am so sure I will remember.  Yeah, never happens.  But if I had a notebook-a small one with a pen attached because there is no way in the world I would remember both things-I’m not sure that writing while driving (“Honey, can you hold the wheel, I’ve got an idea…”) or walking around in nature is quite where I am at the moment.  I want to write and write and write, but I also want to enjoy the meandering my mind does when I’m driving, or the fleeting thoughts that run through my head when my wife and I are happily strolling through nature, or the great first lines (I had one in college I made myself remember, “fish  food, like flakes of skin off a sunburnt back” that I never knew what to do with…) that runs down my chin while picking apples from the tree.

Anyway, wits aside, this has been another exciting week in the life of a student of evaluation.  I have been very excited about AI and its potential to get people talking about the good things that are happening around them.  I think I am a pretty positive person but have been in some pretty negative situations before that were really depressing.  Everyone seemed to sit around and complain about what was wrong, and what they hated, and what should have happened.  At the end of the day, no one was any wiser, no changes had been made or even planned, and it was pretty evident that people were unhappy in general.  How great would it have been to have a facilitator there who would have asked all of us to think of what was working!!  What we wanted more of in order to keep the good stuff going!!

Now, there are some people from these former situations who would be so used to complaining that the opportunity to look at the bright side might be less than appealing.  That’s one of the neat things I learned from the Gervase Bushe article I read.  He pointed out that sometimes it’s necessary to let people get their complainy fix, then use that as a jumping board to focus on what they like.  It helped AI seem more real as a tool by looking at possible pitfalls and addressing them.

Thanks to my classmates, I was also able to think about AI in few additional capacities–one of Matt’s articles discussed the fact that innovative groups are more successful at AI.  This made sense to me, since AI is itself innovative.  While I think that AI could be effective in most situations, I was interested to think about the fact that it would have varying degrees of success.  This in turn led me to wonder about the staying power of an AI infused evaluation.  One of Hannah’s articles got me thinking about this since the evaluation was explained, but the results and changes weren’t.  So I began to wonder if it was like a home improvement show where a group comes in and fixes everything and then leaves and a year later, the home is back to the same mess it is in.  I guess this doesn’t have much to do specifically with AI as with evaluations in general, except that AI is taught as an ongoing process.  This makes it that much more important to think about how to not only change and grow, but how to maintain an attitude that longs for change and growth.

creative commons image courtesy of ricoeurian

I was curious about how this week’s assignment would be overall, but here at the end of the week, I am really happy with it!  I liked reading more about AI, and I liked being exposed to countless other articles that dealt with AI.  For some reason, writing my annotations felt like, to rip off a great simile from Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory throwing rocks in a stream.  Loud, clunky, choppy, heavily punctuated.  I’m not totally sure why that is–fatigue from teaching? pressure to be succinct? I hope I revised them to a decent level of coherence?  I kept thinking that pushing rocks around is a form of meditation in my sister country, Japan–that made the revisions more fun!!!

Over the summer there was this frantic ___ that drove everything I did–getting the house and everything ready for Seijiro (née ‘The Baby’), taking the summer classes, dealing with closing out the school year, then the crash course in parenting, the visits to and from family etc.  It was insane, late, sleepless, non-stop, and really pretty exciting.  Everything was high priority and due any minute.  I think that’s why it’s taking longer than usual to get my rhythm this year than in the past.  I am learning how to be equally as busy, but in a more structured way.  The center of my work day is no longer from 10 pm to 4 am.  I sleep more now.  I have a schedule I adhere to.  It’s such a different busy.  I kind of miss that frantic.

I am happy to still be busy though–I am really enjoying the classes I’m teaching this year.  I have co-teacher for the first time and working with him is an exciting challenge.  Too, I am teaching a creative writing component in the stead of the narrative descriptive unit I am usually teaching at this point in the year–so that is exciting.  Plus, I am also finding a lot of pleasure learning about evaluation.  Maybe it’s hokey, but I think about what I like most about teaching, and try to model my teaching so I get more of that!  I am also thinking hard about how I could get my students talking about my class, then use that data in conjunction with our district curriculum to create a better classroom.  I wonder if it would work to use components of AI in group meetings like we talked about in Tom’s class last spring…

Well, I think I’ve blathered on long enough for now.  If you’ve made it this far, thanks!  If not–no worries, I don’t always read my work after I publish either ! おやすみなさい

 

Raspberry Beret

This has been a super week to be a dad!  Seijiro has started making the raspberry noise complete with spit bubbles and smiles.  As I’ve said before, all that hallmark card, saccharine sentiment about the miracle of birth and the joys of parenthood is completely true.  I am the dad who spends five minutes trying to get his son to make the spit bubble raspberries for everyone we see.  Ugh.

Aside from that, this has also been a crazy good week for school and for school.  For ‘I’m a teacher!’ school, I had meetings and open house and lots of late nights at work and at home.  But it’s always a wonderful sense of accomplishment to make it through busy weeks like this. Open house is a blast (I love meeting the parents )Plus, spending a rainy Saturday napping with the fam is much more gratifying after a super hectic week.

For ‘I’m a student!’ school, things too were hectic, but good hectic.  I found myself again struggling a bit with how to write my introduction for my evaluation.  I tried to use the Preskill case study as a model but had a hard time synthesizing my own introduction.  I thought I had a decent draft, however, for Thursday.  With the kind comments of Kona and Brendan in my head, I looked back at that draft on Friday, and saw a lot of spaces I could fill in.  I poked around at my peer’s introductions and tried to use their drafts as well as my comments to their drafts to help fuel my own rewrite.  I feel a lot better about my second draft, though I certainly am looking forward to future comments.  Something that did help for this second draft was a little looking around for evaluations posted online.  I looked at a couple (can’t remember specifically what they were for) and was able to get a better idea of how I wanted my intro to look.  I toyed with order and content quite a lot over the last two days and ultimately decided that I needed to submit the draft that I had, since I’m sure I made so many adjustments back and forth on Sunday that it probably looks just like it did when I first finished it Saturday night .  It’s done, now though, I am again excited to feel like I am making headway.  Again, I am finding context into which I can apply my very limited knowledge, and that is great!

And then, there is the Preskill and Catsamas text!  I love it already!  Everything rings so true here as for how evaluations usually go.  We are struggling with the issue of advisory at our school.  Many of us really want to have it, but a majority feels like it is another prep with no grade that the kids don’t take seriously and the teachers don’t take seriously and as a result is a wasted 27 minutes every week.  The thing is, though, that it should be a wonderful opportunity to connect with students–we just aren’t sure how to do it very well yet.  Anyhow–when we take surveys, we are always asked what is wrong with it, why don’t kids feel investment?  what should be different?  etc.  And yet I feel that instead we should be focusing on what went right and how can we make that ‘right’ last longer!  AI, thank you!!

The core principles are a wonderful way to look at evaluation.  The focus on communication of the positive aspects of a program being evaluated is really exciting!  The positive principle is like my home planet, I swear.  As per Life of Brian, I do a pretty good job of ‘always look[ing] on the bright side of life.”  I try to believe in the decisions that are made for us, or act to try and change them if I can–but I work really hard to find the positive aspects of things even if I disagree with them.  Of course I’m not infallible, but it’s definitely something I try really hard to do!

The enactment principal too–It makes sense to model the behavior we want to see.  As much as I hated some of the advisory lessons we were given last year, I had to make them as good as I could because I wanted to have success with them and I wanted to tell other teachers that I tried it and it wasn’t that bad.  This stems a bit from my positive nature, but as AI states, if we are sure that everything is going to be terrible before we even give it a shot, then, it probably will be terrible.

Can’t wait to incorporate more AI in my eval!!!  However…time’s up!

 

Cherry Tree, What Cherry Tree?

OK, I can not tell a lie.  Reading the Program Evaluation Standards over the last two weeks has been tough.  I am super interested in learning about evaluation-being able to effectively evaluate the things around me will help me make better more informed decisions as an educator and a citizen: what’s not to like (and no wonder it’s at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy!)?  I am also pretty good at sucking it up and powering through the task at hand, but for some reason, this was a tough text to get through!  So why oh why did I struggle so much with the reading?  I think that it must have been that I was reading these standards without a context for understanding.

When I was getting my ed certificate in undergrad, we were constantly asked to construct a phantom classroom for various assignments.  This was impossible for me because sure, I could, in my head, think of a mixed ability, mixed socio-economic, mixed race class in a suburban public high school.  But I wasn’t fooling anybody–how would I know what that was really like?  How could I make up what my students would be like without ever having students?  How would I know whether or not we could get 90 copies of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman until I faced my administration and asked for money?  How would I know if we lived near a cemetery, or a library, or if we could even take walking field trips until I got a job and could ask?  How would I know any of this until I got into an actual classroom?

Applying the reading, then, to the case study was like getting my first teaching job.  All of a sudden, case study in hand, these standards that I struggled through made perfect sense in their complexity and detail.  I perused the standards again, this time with a goal in mind and could better understand the importance of the standards as well as see their interrelatedness.  I was able to breeze through these once elusive standards.  The lists of criteria and common errors were invaluable to my understanding, and the case studies were often equally as helpful.  And it wasn’t only the standards that made sense.  I was able to better understand the remarkable sophistication of the evaluation process.  When I was working on my early definition of evaluation (that evaluation is the task of using criteria to gauge how well something achieves its purpose) I had no idea of the extent of criteria needed for effective evaluation.  I mean, these are criteria for criteria!

I also had glanced through the Functional Table of Contents, but was overwhelmed and couldn’t imagine needing that many steps and re-steps to complete an evaluation.  However, after looking at the case study and anticipating many problems unless this was done or these people were talked to or this group was given a chance to explain…I gained a further respect for this long list of steps.

What else…I also noticed a lot of similarities between the Program Standards and the AEA guidelines.  That was a relief   It was also helpful to learn that various organizations are all focusing on more or less the same ideas when it comes to evaluation–I think it would be tough if each organization conducted different evaluations!

So overall this week, I feel like I made it over a big hill and found context on the other side-yay!  I also learned a bunch from reading through the analyses and blogs of my peers.  Also, I think I earned a deep respect for the process of planning and conducting an evaluation.  At the same time, I made it through the first two weeks of teaching (whew), began readjusting my sleep patterns (though, who am I kidding there, my sleep patterns haven’t been normal for the last 2 and a half months ), read some wonderful pieces of news, satire, and opinion about the election,  and have been pretty happy doing it!  I love this, and I sure hope that I keep this one going….

 

Formatively Speaking

Yay.  I’m so excited to get back on WordPress.  I got really geeked out for 3 entries this summer, and thought (and hoped) for sure that I would become a blogging fool.  Alas, that was not the case, so the fact that we will have to blog at least once a week is very very exciting–in fact this may be just what I need to continue blogging like I should, especially since WordPress is so nice looking.  And I love when I log in, it tells me I’m already cool

A bit about me: my name is Luke, and the most exciting tidbit I can share right now is that I am a new father (after years of hearing “Luke, I am your father,” it’s finally my turn, though our son’s name isn’t Luke).  He is the coolest little boy in the world, and my wife and I are completely enraptured by watching him grow up.  Also, I like riding scooters, mostly because they’re cheap and cool–I have a old Vespa that is about the most fun thing in the world.  And though I  have hardly read any books over the summer, I have a long list of things I plan to read (I am inspired and awed by the exponential growth of Kona’s Shelfari!!!) My students have already given me Rant by Chuck Palahniuk and The Host by Stephanie Meyer to read.  Plus, I have been dying to read What is the What, Harry Potter 7, and Bastard out of Carolina.  And someday, I hope to live in the Pacific Northwest so that my parks aren’t surrounded by freeways!  Among all of this, I am working on breathing techniques to help me get through fatherhood, teaching, and grad school .

Where I teach English, we are very excited about low-stakes formative assessment in the classroom, and small-stakes summative assessment.  Basically, we are shying away from grades based primarily on daily homework assignments and a unit test.  We are hoping instead to create smaller, more frequent assessments.  I would love to learn how to create more effective assessments and evaluations of student progress.  Another thing I would love to do is to have my students keep portfolios that I could evaluate at the end of a quarter/semester and assign a grade based more on progress than on my expectations.  Having created my first porfolio ever last spring in Tom’s class, I would love to gain the knowledge required to successfully evaluate a body of student work.  I guess that I am garbage at grades and grading, and am excited to learn about creating effective evaluations that are fair for my students.

 

b movie

I haven’t got much to say right now–but I’m afraid to not post. I want to keep this one going. I will say I’m pretty amazed that it’s 2:45 and I’m still awake. In the last years, I’ve been enjoying the other side of night so much that I’m usually in bed long long before this. But the cool breeze and quiet that are drifting in and out of the windows are reminding me of how fun the night is.

When I was in Japan, my wife and I had great friends in Oyama. About once a month, we’d go to have dinner with them, and at about 10:00pm decide to go to karaoke. The four of us love singing, so we’d always get the all night package and end up staying till they kicked us out at 5 am. We were always tired, our throats sore, but we felt great, oddly awake. When we’d get finally get home at about 6, the rice fields would be covered in dew–drops hanging on the tips of the grass. Don’t totally know why–but I always felt so awake (after a short nap, of course) on those days.

Short note on how to use tech in the classroom. Not sure about this, but I’ve been wondering if maybe it would be better to have one wiki/blog/per class, as opposed to having all 160 of my kids post in one place. I hate separating them, and I love the interclass collaboration, but I love thinking about how much easier it would be to assess students if there were groups of thirty that corresponded with my classes.

Then–if I did that, I could stagger assignments so that I could maybe only have one set of thirty essays to grade a week–I bet I’d get them graded faster and feel less stresses. Hmmmm. Will have to keep thinking about this one!

One last thing–thank the lord for Apple Inc. so graciously replacing me keyboard for free (as a result of a ‘design flaw’) but the new ‘b’ on this thing doesn’t work so well. With no disrespect to those with a certain connection to the letter ‘b’, I never figured it would be much of a problem. It is. It’s driving me crazy. This is what my typing sounds like:

pitterpitterpitterpitterpitterpitterpitterpitterpitterpitter.PUSH.PUSH.sigh.PUSH.PU.pitter   pitterpitter.PUSH.PUS.pitteretc.