The truth about cats and dogs

We have a new exchange student from Azerbaijan, which has gotten me into this blog from a teacher in that country.

Leigh has a really interesting recent post about how dogs and cats are viewed in Azerbaijan. Very different from how we view them (almost as children), and also quite different from what I observed in Bolivia, where nearly every household has at least one dog for guarding purposes. Dogs are also rarely spayed or neutered, so they have the same hordes of stray dogs roaming around as what Leigh is talking about.

Promises to keep

Sarah Vowell has a really nice homage to Ted Kennedy and the Democrats, the party of Pell Grants, in yesterday's NY Times. I particularly enjoyed her interpretation of Obama's vision of the "promise" of the U.S.:

Picture this: a wind-powered public school classroom of 19 multiracial 8-year-olds reading above grade level and answering the questions of their engaging, inspirational teacher before going home to a cancer-free (or in remission) parent or parents who have to work only eight hours a day in a country at war solely with the people who make war on us, where maybe Exxon Mobil can settle for, oh, $8 billion in quarterly profits instead of $11 billion, and the federal government’s point man for Biblical natural disasters is someone who knows more about emergency management than how to put on a horse show.

The second year

... already I can tell is going to be so much better than the first year.

School of Bolivia

Hello from La Paz, the world's highest capital. The School of Bloggers have been in Cochabamba, Bolivia for a couple of weeks (following two weeks in and around Guadalajara, Mexico, where Chris's sister got married), and are now in La Paz for a little bit of business and mostly pleasure.

Now on to the interesting stuff: Bolivia has been in a familiar state of discontent recently in the weeks leading up to a referendum on the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. In the past week or so there have been a lot of road blocks, protests, and strikes over the pension system.

In the Cochabamba department, the urban and rural teachers' unions have been on strike for about a week now. All of the strike days will be made up at the end of the school year, like snow days, but that hasn't prevented government officials from making nasty statements that sound all too familiar. A representative from the Department of Education said something the other day like, "We ask that the teachers have a little more respect for their students."

Hmm. Just like in the U.S., if teachers think about their own livelihoods, they are being selfish.

Anyway, we are having a great time, and I will post another update when I can.

Love it or fix it

I don't often click on web ads, but today I did and came across GOOD Magazine. I was particularly excited about their slogan "Love it or fix it."

I have a lot of students who have a "Love it or leave it" attitude when it comes to being critical of the U.S. I'm excited about having a catchy new blurb to use as a teaching tool this fall.

The Gap

As an SAT prep instructor for several years, and now as a high school career advisor, I have always made it a point to encourage any kid who will listen to take a year off after graduating high school to do something totally random before continuing down their career path.

It seems like the editors of the New York Times are of the same mind. Every now and then they'll publish a story about students who take a "gap year" in Ghana before going on to Princeton or Yale to study nanotechnology or microfinance.

I'm being snarky, but I really do believe that taking a year off before college was the best thing I ever did for my post-secondary education and my career. My instant best friend in college (and still one of my closest friends) had taken a year off to live in France. We were both just a little more mature, and a little more ready to get on with the whole college thing.

When I bring up The Gap to parents, they typically look at me like I'm crazy. But once I explain the benefits -- that you're likely to get more out of college when you're more mature, that it gives you another year to save for college, that you can apply for college now and defer your admission -- they tend to warm up to the idea.

History repeating

Is it me, or does this initiative to reduce the amount of time IT workers spend on unnecessary (work-related) emails seem a bit ... Taylorish?

Testing testing

I'd be really interested in seeing the Georgia statewide middle school social studies test that was so hard, 70 to 80 percent of students failed, and the state had to throw out the results. (Via ASCD Inservice)

What was so hard about the test? I'm curious. Not just because I'm a social studies teacher, but also because I grew up in Georgia and took plenty of standardized tests there.

Meanwhile, Georgia's lucky that they can throw out social studies scores, since social studies tests are not mandated by NCLB (yet), but they have also "questioned the validity" of the math tests, which are required. What do you do about that in the NCLB era?

Should have, would have, etc.

The last day of school was on Friday, which was also D-Day. Slate.com has a great series of photos from that time period that I wish I could have used for my contemporary U.S. history class. Sigh.

So I'm done with my first year. All of my seniors were able to walk at graduation, though some will be attending summer school before they can get their diplomas. My grades are entered, and I've taken the college posters down from the career office so they can paint the walls. I've sent reams of paper to the recycling bin. I even had time to sign a few yearbooks.

Now all I can do is reflect on what happened in 07-08, and what I can do differently in 08-09. I feel like as a social studies teacher, I should be scurrying around trying to plan curriculum to take advantage of this historic presidential election year.

But ... that can wait a day or two, can't it?

"Well you give HIM some trouble."

The Department of Ed is now giving my school trouble about the fact that I don't have my Minnesota license. The reason I don't have my license is that the Department of Ed wouldn't give it to me. So it goes ...

I still get emails on my NYU account about social studies job openings at all of these wonderful New York City schools, including both schools where I student taught, for which I would be perfectly licensed and certified. I don't know why I even bother opening those emails.

Meanwhile I'm working on proving that I am qualified to teach social studies in Minnesota. Luckily my school is supporting me throughout this process. But what happens if the state comes down on my school with more than just a slap on the wrist? With their budget they can't afford to keep someone on staff who legally can't teach, and they wouldn't risk having to pay fines or lose funding over it.

Students being historians

My contemporary U.S. history students today conducted their oral history interviews. Two groups went to the senior apartment complex next door and came back really excited about the people they'd interviewed, one of whom was a soldier during World War II under General Patton. The Cold War group interviewed one of our school leaders, who told them about being a child in Iowa when Khrushchev made the "We will bury you" speech from an Iowa cornfield.

We'll see tomorrow how much they got out of it. This oral history project has been a huge challenge and a huge learning experience for me ... hopefully the kids have learned a thing or too as well.

UPDATE: Obviously I meant to write a thing or two. And obviously I have been hanging out with teenagers and reading their writing too, too much. They presented their interview data today -- pretty interesting! More in a post to come.

Summer, summer. I love the summer.

Hard to believe I'm coming up on the last week of my first year of teaching. I have a lot of mixed, confused feelings about it all. But most of all I'm ready for a good long break. The School of Bloggers are making travel arrangements for a trip to Guadalajara for Chris's sister's wedding, then on to Bolivia for the rest of the summer. We'll be there long enough to see the Urkupiña festival in mid-August, then get back just in time for staff development before school starts again!

Graduation's on Monday. I think I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief to see my seniors walking across that stage.

Fashion police

One of my students said to me today, "Do you even think about your outfits before you put them on?" I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Like on Friday, you were wearing these khaki-ish pants, a green shirt, and a blue sweater. It just really didn't work."

I invited her to come to my house every day at 6 a.m. and be my personal wardrobe adviser.

Seriously though, it's amazing what kids notice.

I had another couple of students -- seniors -- in my office today talking to me about an issue they were having with another teacher. Right before they had to leave to go to class, they looked at each other conspiratorially and asked, "This may be a personal question, but are you okay? We have noticed that you've been sort of sad recently."

I was touched that they had noticed and that they'd said asked about it. It's nice to have little reminders every now and then of why I keep chugging along.

Chug chug chug

Minnesota's giving me a hard time with my teaching license. It's a pain but apparently it's something of an unofficial policy: making it hard for out of state teachers to get certified in Minnesota. The line they're drawing in the sand for me is the fact that my undergraduate major was Urban Studies and not history, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science or geography.

Oh well, just keep on chugging. This week the kids in my contemporary U.S. history class will write their interview questions for their oral history project, and hopefully we'll have two guest speakers: a student's great uncle who was a scout in World War II, and a member of the Minnesota Eight.

Why did Humpty Dumpty have a great fall?

To make up for a horribly depressing spring. Last week we had our staff development week in which we started planning for next year. There was something so energizing about taking a break from thinking about all of my "failures" from this year and starting over, learning from my mistakes.

One of my many hats is as the advisor for the senior projects, which the seniors have been working on all year. The students will be presenting these this week, so I'm excited and nervous to see how they will turn out.

Funny

Uncle Globey & Friends | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Not quite this bad, but close

Economic Stimulus Check Burned For Warmth

HELENA, MT—Saying the extra bit of kindling material couldn't have come at a better time, 43-year-old school teacher Tim Donaldson received his...

The dumps, and being down in them

The other day in my reading and writing lab we went over subject/verb agreement, and then as an informal assessment of the students' understanding I asked them to write a little story in which they played around with the S/V rule by using it both correctly and incorrectly. When I was grading them this morning I saw that one student had written this:

This IS such a boring class. July [sic] IS just about the worst teacher in the school.

I don't know if it's just first-year-teacher syndrome, or if it's just me. But if today hadn't been a professional development day I probably would have gone home sick at that point and never come back.

Zombie Prom

My usual Friday Night Syndrome is being too exhausted after a week of teaching to move very far from the couch. Tonight, however, I am finishing up my job as prom coordinator. A job I will NEVER DO AGAIN.

Puppets

The NY Times has a great expose today about how the Pentagon controlled TV news analysis of the Iraq war by using retired military officers with ties to government contractors:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

I'd love to use this somehow in a critical thinking skills lesson. Any ideas?

On a similar note, I want to do a lesson tomorrow where kids learn how to think critically about textbooks -- who writes textbooks and why, what biases they might have, etc. One of the essential questions in my Contemporary U.S. history class is "is there one 'true' version of history?" And a lot of kids have been saying, "sure, the version that's in the textbook." So I want to disabuse them of that notion.

Has anyone done a lesson like this before?


A few more years of the Bush administration and we'd all be studying this ...