I prefer my puns intended

Because life can be punny.

I choose “C” (Two-Cent Teacher Tuesdays)

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I have decided that “Teacher Tips” Tuesday is an incredibly presumptuous title for what I was attempting to accomplish on my little blog.  I am new to education; I don’t pretend to know it all, but I will assert that I have learned a few things in my short years of experience.  I love what I do; I am not a passive participant in education.  I try to re-invent what I do each year so that I can keep up with new trends in education and reach this new generation of students. My goal for triple T was to dedicate the second workday of each week to become a voice for teachers in the frustrating times and share material in those moments when we just need a little help.

 In light of this, I’ve decided to re-name my Tuesday editorials “Two-cent Teacher Tuesdays.”  I don’t pretend to be the prevailing opinion of all teachers, but that is why it is my two cents.  I have said it before: there is no one solution for the problems in education.  Many thought NCLB was the answer.  The Indiana State Board of Education still believes that could be the answer to monitoring “teacher and principal evaluation…(and) raising academic achievement.” Despite my affections for the dub, I wholly disagree.  Student growth cannot be measured through a series of standardized tests.  According to U.S. News & World Reports, a teacher assessment method which emphasizes student growth “has a weak to nonexistent link with teacher performance.” To be clear, testing students for the sake of testing students does not prepare students for real life.  It only prepares them for multiple choice tests.  This extreme importance we have placed on student achievement on high stakes exams affords extreme scenarios, like the APS cheating scandal.   We can’t just give students answer choices and expect them to be able to verbalize higher order thinking skills.  The following video shows the holes in NCLB:

Some people may disagree with me, and that is ok.

Penn Jillette said to Glenn Beck, “The idea of the marketplace of ideas is that everybody talks to everybody; the fact that we disagree so much…is the reason we should be talking…and standing up for each other.”

In my opinion, we must give students learning objectives.  We must give students valuable writing tasks.  We cannot rest on giving assignments and not placing them inside real world scenarios.  The idea that our students are increasingly unable to engage in public discourse is the reason that I have begun to seek alternate assignments in assessing my students on objectives.

As a literature teacher, I get to walk through fiction and allow students to sort through their own connections to real-world applications.  This school year, I focused predominantly on Socratic Seminar as my primary assessment model.  My final exam for first semester was a Socratic Seminar that required students to connect in three valuable ways.

Each student is provided these instructions:

You will be graded on your preparation, thoroughness of discussion including textual examples, and your overall participation within the seminar.  Remember, if you don’t talk, you don’t get a grade.   Be sure to have specific examples that fit each of the prompts.   You must prepare for each topic, but you will only discuss one per unit that will be assigned on the day of the Socratic Seminar.  I will take up the work that you do for each of these and give you a completion grade.  You may mark up any novels that you would like to use.  You may use any project we have completed.  You may NOT use a cell phone or tablet during the Socratic Seminar.

Text to Self: Students had to relate major themes of YA literature (Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian) to themselves and be able to verbalize what they had written.

1    Many have experienced the pangs of not fitting into a group that they desperately would like to become a part of.  Still, others have been accused of concealing their motivations in order to get whatever it is that they want. Discuss two instances in your choice novel of someone concealing their identity or motivations and at least one example in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian where a character conceals part of who they are to fit in or get what they want.

Other points of discussion:
a.     Pull from personal experience: do you know of anyone who conceals a part of themselves to be well-liked? Do you believe this is the best method to achieve the desired result (being well liked)? Why or why not?

Pull an example from pop-culture or a historical reference of someone concealing their personality or motivations in order to get something that they want.

Text to Society: Students had to cite textual references for the reasons why they believed what they believed.  For Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth,” for example, students had to answer this question:

1.     The commoditization/objectification of women/culture
      a. In which ways does Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth illustrate the commoditization and              objectification of women within pre-revolutionary China?

b.      How does our culture objectify commoditize women/other cultures? Explain using specific advertisements, videos, details to support your response.

Text to Text: Students had to take Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlett” and relate back to another novel they’d read earlier in the semester using these questions as a guideline:

1.      In class, we discussed true love and the boundaries of true love.  Answer the following using specific details from the text.
a.      Was Jefferson Hope truly in love with Lucy Ferrier? Why or why not?
b.      Were Jefferson Hope’s actions truly justified? Why or why not?
c.      Is true love possible among people in high school? Why or why not?

d.      How far is too far for love in high school?

By allowing students to engage in a conversation with their peers about literature and make connections to their personal experiences, observations from society, and other novels, they greatly improved their ability to grapple with more complex thinking skills.  These skills cannot be measured or assessed by a multiple choice exam.  No student could choose “c” and get away with it.