What Is success?

For the past seven or eight years,   I have taken my students to the local university library.  They enter, awed at the four stories of books available to them as they begin their academic writing careers.  By the time their instruction session has finished, and they have become intimate with databases, the electronic card catalog, academic journals and Boolean searches, some I have found weeping in the stacks on Third Floor, East, hopelessly confused about how to locate a particular title; others I have seen stumble down the steps looking dazed, their eyes unfocused and their voices not quite coherent.

Even so, most tell me later, sometimes years later, that this field trip is one of the best they have taken.   They have been challenged to find what academics have written about their research topics and have used it to create their own arguments.  They have conquered the various types of scholarly media that a university offers and supports.  And they have seen firsthand the rigor and expectation of the post-secondary education world – as well as the hundreds of college-age hotties they failed to impress, properly putting them back into their place in the pecking order of academia.

Sadly, this field trip has dwindled from including all my sophomores to only a few AP Language students.  The number of students being exposed to this academic world has decreased from two buses filled with eager students of all backgrounds and capabilities to only the few high ability students who have hung in there for the second semester of a challenging course.  It has become difficult to take students out of their classes with high stakes tests for field trips. Other teachers complain.  After all, their students' tests results impact their performance reviews.  I get that.

But if all students truly must be college and career ready, they all should be given the chance to see what  college expects of them.  Shouldn’t the students who claim in their writer’s notebooks that they want to be doctors and lawyers, nurses and physical therapists, teachers and computer designers, video game designers and vets see what will be expected of them if they choose to pursue these paths?  Isn’t that a large part of making them college and career ready? 

What a shame that "success" is more frequently becoming created from sitting in a classroom, memorizing facts and working practice sets to pass a standardized test, instead of experiencing the challenges of conquering higher level inquiry.

Would you rather…?

Would you rather swim in a pool filled with frogs or bathe in whipped cream every day?

No question. I’d take the whipped cream, even though I’d smell like a carton of  warm sour milk by the end of the week.  I hate frogs.

Yesterday at the Indiana Writing Project’s workshops “ISTEP: The Write Strategies,” my colleagues Kathy Flatter and Lindsey Thompson shared several fun ways to make the writing to a prompt genre more engaging.  One of them was the “Would You Rather…” game.     You may remember the concept:  Two equally difficult scenarios are juxtaposed for players to consider... and defend.  In the board game version, you might have to predict the response of another player or the consensus of the group after discussion to earn a point.

But there are also websites devoted to these ethical and silly conundrums.

Here is an example from nicka who submitted a proposition to the sometimes inappropriate for school website http://www.rrrather.com/ :  Would you rather… go way back in time and meet your ancestors OR go way into the future and meet your great grandchildren? Interestingly, the website actually breaks down the total 289,452 votes by gender and country, which could be a great tool for prediction exercises and higher order thinking…. but that’s an idea for another day.

I agree with Kathy and Lindsey that using these questions IS a super way to engage kids in creating argument.  Some of the choices can be really wacky and appealing, especially for kids who are learning to create and support written argument.  But I am in the throes of trying to help ninth graders respond to multi-part prompts about Shakespearean text, and these questions seem too simplistic at this point in my unit.

So, I’ve decided to write a few of my own, two-part challenges.  “Would You Rather… Double Dips” I will call them, or  WYRDD’s.

Here’s one that I am going to use in an online discussion next week: Would you rather… Pick a fight with someone you hated and be terribly wounded, OR defend the honor of someone and be beaten in public?

Here’s another:  Would you rather… Marry your true love and never see your family again, OR marry someone rich and retain your family’s love and support?

Okay, so maybe these prompts aren’t as engaging as the whipped cream  or time travel ones, but they do meet my academic needs.  They connect to the themes of Romeo and Juliet, and they provoke a moral or ethical responses, a sure hit with teenagers.

But they are also more than that: Students will need to discuss BOTH elements of their choice, not just one and justify themselves. That’s the part that will help them with the multi-layered prompts they will see on their state tests, the part they are currently struggling with in classroom writing.

So this week we’ll do a couple of WYRDD’s together and then students will create their own WYRDD’s from their independent reading books and post them for their peers. By Friday, I 'm hoping they'll be ready to take on a double- dip essay prompt about Romeo and Juliet, without any overt help from the whipped cream or frogs. 

Snow days, anyone?

My calendar is so messed up!  We’ll never get through this unit on the Civil War!  How am I going to get my kids ready to pass ISTEP? 

Over the past few weeks of snow days and weather delays, teachers have been moaning about how to cover their curriculum.   Facebook posts, text messages, and the few hallway conversations we have had revolve mostly around whether we will be in school tomorrow, how to cover material in a 30-minute class period…. and what tasty recipes someone found while at home surfing Pinterest.

Even administrators are wringing their hands, mostly because we are missing days that prepare students for the state tests looming ever near.

A few schools in Indiana have been permitted to make up their missed days through a pilot e-learning program, where students work at home if school has been cancelled.  I’m trying to head in that direction, although my school is not on the pilot program list.  My classes that use My Big Campus and Google Sites are allowing students with Internet access to keep working, if they are so inclined.  In class, they use the school laptops; at home they use their own devices. 

And e-learning certainly has advantages. 

Students have access to supporting videos and resource material that can be individually viewed as many times as needed for scaffolding, or ignored if they aren’t needed.  Groups can work together remotely in discussions that also support learning; students can work when they are able and interested- even at 2 AM.  Teachers can provide feedback from home, and make adjustments or new assignments as needed.

In many ways, the winter weather has given us a chance to jump into the flipped classroom concept informally.   We can see what works, and what doesn’t, and why.

With the kind of engagement that e-learning offers, I’m thinking that filling those extra days in June won’t be such a challenge.