September 21st, 2007 walkere
Teaching in an urban district, I never thought I’d be in this situation. My class is too small. It has one student.
Originally, I thought it was a scheduling glitch, which it probably is. I figured it would get cleared up. The first day of school, I had no students. Then I had one; but she was a junior, waiting to get transferred into a US II class.
Then one day a girl from another one of my US I courses randomly got transferred into my Period 6 Honors US History class. She wasn’t going anywhere; she needed to take US I. Apparently, no one else was coming in. For the past week, it’s been a one student class.
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September 21st, 2007 walkere
The first stop in my class on the way to colonization was the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Spanish holdings constitute almost half of what is now the US, so how can we understand our history if we don’t understand those that came before us?
This lesson plan is intended to be a one day introduction to the development and culture of the Spanish Empire. It is far from exhaustive, and I would love to do more with it. However, I don’t have the time in your packed curriculum to dwell on it. So if you’re looking for a short, one day overview of New Spain, read on.
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September 20th, 2007 walkere
In one of my education courses, we read the book Urban Teaching by Lois Weiner. It was mildly interesting and informative, but it wasn’t terribly great. There is one phrase from the book that I do remember and cling too, though.
She discussed the broken and twisted nature of the administration in most urban districts. The term she used was “sick.” In the metaphor, the administration (and the school as a whole) is like an organism - a leviathan if you will. When it does not function properly, it is sick, malformed, and dysfunctional. This dysfunction, of course, has deleterious effects on the operation of the school as a hole.
Why do I bring this up? Because the administration in my school is hopelessly dysfunctional. It is unbelievably sick.
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September 19th, 2007 walkere
I’m always looking for primary documents to use in class. Documents that are already in electronic form are the best - it saves me the time of typing or copying and editing the documents.
The Virginia Center for Digital History has a small collection of primary documents that are suitable for secondary social studies classrooms. The goal of the website is “helping secondary school teachers … find primary resources on the web, related to their curriculum.”
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September 19th, 2007 walkere
Most kids today have computers and internet access at home. Why not create a class website to help bring your classroom into their home?
There are tons of things you can do with a class website and dozens of reasons to make one. However, you may think that it’s too hard, too time consuming, or too costly.
Some advanced projects would be hard and time consuming, but a simple class website is not. You can set up a free website for your class in about 15 minutes. Check out the guide I wrote on Associated Content, A Guide for Technologically Impaired Teachers to Create a Website to Accompany Their Classes to learn how.
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September 18th, 2007 walkere
As I looked at my schedule the day before school started, I noticed that one class was titled “US 1 LEP.” I thought “Hmm… LEP? Does that mean what I think it means?”
In my interview, I talked with the vice principal and supervisor about my experience working with students who had poor reading and writing skills. I talked about my experience working with inclusion classes and students with IEPs. Nowhere did I tell them I had any experience working with ELLs… and that’s exactly what I got.
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September 16th, 2007 walkere
This lesson plan is an attempt to spice up an otherwise bland section of the textbook - Central and West African Kingdoms, circa 1450. This section is intended to provide students with some background on what the world was like when Columbus sailed west and sparked the colonization of the Americas.
The lesson begins with a simple reading prompt. It is an excerpt from Gomes Eanes de Zurara that I found interesting. In discussing the discovery of Guinea, he describes Africa as being sparsely populated by nomadic peoples. He makes no reference to the large kingdoms (Benin, Songhai, etc) or to Timbuktu.
The students task, then, is to research African civilization at this time period and write a letter to the King of Portugal to convince him that de Zurara was wrong.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
I’m planning on doing a webquest like lesson on Monday, so I’ve been poking around the internet to see how other people have been using technology in their classrooms.
I found an article at A History Teacher with a cool tip. Apparently you can use a Google service to create a custom search engine for your students to use. You can hand select what sites are included in the index, and then students can use it as if it were plain old Google. This would probably help keep them on track, and I might look into using this later in the year.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
No Child Left Behind has been a major topic of discussion for educators for years. Every faculty meeting has something to do with test scores, AYP, and improving performance.
Now that NCLB is coming up for renewal, it’s returning to the public discussion, too. So what do we do with the law?
Undoubtedly, some educators would like to scrap it altogether. That might not be such a bad idea. It’s bad PR, though. Even though we know that NCLB is a poor measure of student achievement and school success, the public (i.e. the media and politicians) perceive it as a real way to enforce accountability on corrupt and ineffective schools.
Rather than completely scrap the law, we need to look for other ways to enforce accountability. The proposed changes to the law, that would allow for different measures of student success, is a step in the right direction. To be truly effective, though, the law needs to move away from standardized tests and move towards authentic assessments.
In my opinion, electronic portfolios are the way of the future and they should be the way to go. Check out my article No Child Left Behind: The Needs of Children Vs. Politicians to get a better idea of what I mean.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
There are countless ways to write up your lesson plans. Some teachers and administrators like long, detailed lesson plans complete with an outline of information to be delivered. Others like the short and sweet one week summary, with objectives, activities, and assignments.
No matter what type of lesson plan you prefer, it will help make your life easier to have en electronic template (probably in MS Word or Excel) to begin with. This way you can type up your lesson plans, save them to your computer, and avoid making countless copies of a blank template that you got from a co-worker four years ago.
Here are two different blank templates that you might find useful.
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