It appears I have jumped in time again, or we had another snow day. At times, I'm not sure myself. I rediscovered in Read 180 today that our text is slightly outdated. (I'm not sure the text has been updated by Scholastic since it was made, but I could be wrong.) Each unit has a real-world connection to a career based around the unit, and this unit was on money. The career for this unit was a music store manager, which is an almost obsolete career. Only one of my students had ever been inside a music store since they buy or download their music from iTunes or some illegal site. We discussed what careers were similar to a music store manager, such as the manager for other types of businesses.
In English 12, we finished up discussing chapter 3. I showed them some pictures of Allied POWs walking under German watch and a picture from a museum that depicted the men on a railcar like Billy and Roland were sardined into. They have to read chapter 4 for tonight with a day of reckoning tomorrow. For their sakes, I hope they read.
In creative writing, we started talking about tone. To show them how tone can change the feeling, I played two versions "Stand by Me". I started with the Ben E. King version, which is by far the most popular version of the song. I then played a version by Ki: Theory, which is radically different and dark. Here is the the link to this version if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psm4XGVtQAY#t=72 (I heard this version on one of my new addictions, "The Following" on FOX. If you would be interested in a dark show about a former English professor obsessed with Poe who is a serial killer and his cult following, you should watch it.) I then showed them a poem I had written about dueling angels on my shoulders as in Tom and Jerry. We discussed how the good angel would have soft, sweet tone and the devil angel would have a mean, demanding, snarky tone. I showed them what I had done with it, and encouraged them to do this on their own in their own evil and good voices. They struggled with this as many found it hard to find their evil voice and tone. I told them it was in there, and we would find it and draw it out. We will have to continue this lesson tomorrow.
Cluster had a new time and day today due to our record 7th snow day yesterday, but we will return to our same bat time and channel next week. Today, we discussed the final part of the ACE strategy for constructed response, explaining the citation, which is technically more of an essay/SAT strategy, but it can have benefit on a constructed response as well. I discussed with our leader how I feared it could lead kids astray by them rambling and getting off topic, and that we need to have good discussions with our students as to when the citation is enough and when the citation needs further explanation. I have graded these type of tests before during the summer, and most of the scorers would struggle to adequately score a response that had the right answer then rambled. The leader and I had a good discussion and we both agreed on the same points and are on the same page. This part of the strategy will be the hardest for the kids to do well and stay on topic, but as with anything, practice and repetition tends to cure ails such as these. Next week we get to discuss what strategies would help students buy into reading and writing. I'm pretty excited actually, almost giddy.
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