This week I'm working on getting my students excited about learning. Sounds pretty easy, but it's not. Most of the time I get caught up in entertaining the kids aka Teacher focused learning. What needs, has to happen is that I get the kids to find discover their own learning, engaging. To often the students watch me like a TV or a sports event. What needs to happen is they are the actors or athlete's participating in the show or event. The teacher is the director or even the coach, but the kids are doing the work.
I'm not 100% sure HOW as much as I am sure I HAVE to get these babies excited about their learning. Even if it flies counter to what they see/hear/know all around them. Got a hefty task, but nothing else really matters. I see it, that the World we live in is a hard and often horrible place. I need to help them see it as well and know that the more well prepared they are the better it will be for them in the long run. I'd love to Skype with a class same age, background that's really making different choices to show my class that they can do it, but they have to be willing to fight the gravitational pull in order to soar as high as we all know they can.
Last week was a bear getting ready for the math assessment. Let's just say that the bear wasn't a cute cuddily teddy. We got beat up by a big huge grizzly. So today I have my homeroom all day and we're going to slice, dice, and review what happened. I have some great student focused activities for them to do to hopefully discover their own mistakes on the test. Besides drilling and killing we need to also to plow our way through geometric shapes since last week we talked about flat shapes.
My trick is learning to keep maintaining the class while we're moving forward into new content. I see it like an engineer on a self contained vessel. Somehow they keep the current systems on line while adding new and doing new things. All that while keeping x amount of people provided for. I have a set amount of kids who have to get to a destination. While we travel we drop off bad habits, pick up new ones, learn tons of information, prove that we've learned it, sometimes double back and pick up some more all while still moving ahead. What I need to do is meet some people in the cruise industry or navy who can explain how they keep that juggling act going.
I'm collecting stuff for some good remediation centers. The basics will NEVER get old. I also am doing some extension activities to keep what we learned a live. This is going to be a strong push until the end of the month. Hope the kids can hold on.
Got a great CrossFit WOD planned today. I feel much better. Once my eating gets back on track I should be back fully.
