Marching ahead

With February vacation out of the way, the month of March looms with its longness and coldness. March is always a tough month and this year is no exception. We kick things off with a crazy week for Winter Carnival. We have 2 late nights of parent/teacher conferences in March coming up as well. I like meeting with parents, but its really hard to put in what end up being 15 hour days and have anything left for students the next day. Then our once every 10 year accreditation visit happens. A team of about 16 teachers will visit our school for 3 years and decide if we get to keep our accreditation or not. Testing for Juniors happens in March, as does the Spring play. There is also Model UN prep, and a bunch of other things I'm doing (like the "Food for Thought" PD for social studies teachers at the end of the month). I will be happy when March concludes!

(2014 Winter Carnival t shirt design)

I started off the week meeting with 9 teachers from my school who will be doing a book study that I am leading around the book "The Core Six". This is the same book my earlier webinars were based on. Most of our study will be online but should lead to some interesting thinking around the best literacy based instructional strategies!

All students registered for courses for next year this week, which may seem early but trust me it isn't. Sometime next week I will receive the signed forms from my 9th grade advisees and then go online to officially register them.

In U.S. History classes we wrapped up the Teddy Roosevelt simulation. We also did a small one class simulation that is really more like a game designed to teach them about the errors in reasoning that led to world war one. This game is called "War" and I got it from one of the my professors in College. I love how old it is, the citation in the handout says it was originally printed in Social Education Journal in 1966.

(photo I took of a recent copy of the journal Social Education, I don't have the one form 1966!)

My online VHS class rolls along with group projects posted to an online Wiki. Here they were assigned one of 4 options through the Choices program simulations. They had to defend the option they were assigned related to the end start of the Cold War. They were to pretend they were advising President Truman on how he should respond to the Soviet threat. Here is 2 parts of a student sample:

In Ethics we spent time this week looking at right vs. wrong dilemmas in order to point out that some dilemmas are actually right vs. right. This is where much of the rest of the course puts its emphasis. Students will be starting Moral Courage projects next week.

In Psychology, we spent some time looking at the structures of the brain, and how are senses fool us. We mapped the brain, and we looked at optical illusions, and other examples of perception. Next week students will be keeping a dream journal and they are already excited about it!

(Do you see the chin and ear of a young woman turning away, or the nose, mouth and eye of an old woman?)

Also this week, 6 different administrators visited my classroom in 10 minute intervals. They were practicing a walkthrough observation technique that will we be suing as part of our future evaluations. I was pleasantly surprised to find such positive and reassuring feedback. Apparently my students could articulate the target for the day! I was distracted by the simulation, so I couldn't hear what my students said to them when they visited. It was a little stressful, but I feel reassured a bit that I am on the right track.

Next week is Winter Carnival, which means I will get one good class out of each course next week and the rest of the week will basically be shot because of how distracted they will be by the Winter Carnival activities! I hope March comes in like a lion so it will go out like a lamb!