Well, students, this week has been an adventure. For sure. One thing we now know: school will be out at least another month. Governor Greg Abbott has issued a state-wide mandate requiring schools to remain closed until at least May 4th. After that announcement, HISD announced that physical school will remain closed "until further notice." I want to thank all of you who made an effort (even if it wasn't completely successful) to engage and interact with our online TEAMS class meetings. I know it's weird, and I know it's a poor substitute for real school. Thank you guys for sticking with this whole experiment and investing in your learning. Your learning: let's take a minute to talk a little about what it will look like for the rest of the year. Since the STAAR has been cancelled, the only graduating requirement you need from our English 2 class is the credit for the course. In other words, a passing grade. As I've said a couple of times, we have two major objectives (generally speaking): reading and writing. I asked you guys to respond to a Google Form to give feedback about how our reading and writing will look for the last cycle, and the winners (in both classes) were another free-choice novel for reading, and structured journaling for writing. We're going to go with this, although I reserve the right to introduce short class readings. We will finish our dialectical journals for our 1st round of free choice novels on April 9th when your 9th and 10th dialectical journals will be due. After that, we will start a new free choice book. Maybe you are lucky enough to have access to a book that you would enjoy reading, but in case you don't, check out the resources in my previous blog post to help you find some free online books to browse. In addition to those sites and resources, we now have access to a National Emergency Library with even more titles available for free. In the first TEAMS meeting of next week, we'll discuss ways for you to find your next novel. If you're having a hard time finding a book you would enjoy after that, reach out on Remind to schedule a free choice book conference. As far as structured journaling goes, you will write 250 words with at least one image due every Friday starting April 17th. You can choose when you write the words: all at once, or you can just do one fifty word entry per day. You can hand-write and photograph your journal entries (as long as I can read them), you can type them up and turn them in as a Google Doc, or you can do a little learning adventure of your own and set up your own blog and publish your posts just like I'm publishing these posts. I'll be available to small group conference with any students who are interested in setting up their own blogs, but aren't sure how to do it. The platform I'm most familiar with is this one, Weebly. Creating a blog has more personal benefits beyond just increasing your literacy and exercising your writing abilities. A blog can become a part of a digital portfolio that you can continue adding to and crafting throughout the rest of your high school career and beyond. Universities all over the country are using digital portfolios as a part of their admissions requirements. Some of these universities are fancy, like Columbia and Harvard, and some are closer to home, like Texas A&M. More than ever, becoming adept at digital tools can only help you in your present and future success. Plus, it's a fun way to communicate with friends and family in our time of social distancing. We will be discussing our structured journals in our second TEAMS meeting of the week. Whatever your journal ends up looking like, it will be graded by word count and image. Do you have 250 words? 50 points towards your grade. Do you have a photo or image of some kind? 50 more points. My next blog post will be an example of a weekly journal submission: 250 random words and some images. As opposed to this post, which is however many not random words and some images. I'll leave with a short video of blooming flowers to remind you that we live in a beautiful world, and that this strange chapter in our lives won't last forever. Heeellllllo000ooo, students! The following is going to be a VERY LONG post. You may know by now, but just in case you don’t, school has been cancelled until at least April 10th. Also, Governor Greg Abbott has cancelled STAAR testing for all Texas students this year. If social media is right, parents everywhere are home from work and in the strange position of spearheading their kids’ learning for the first time. Next Tuesday, March 31st, online learning is going to be kicked off for real, but just in case any of your parents are struggling/pushing/encouraging you to do schoolwork right now, I wanted to give some guidance about ways you could spend your time learning meaningfully. Time: you have it, unexpectedly and in abundance. As a high schooler, I remember my time never being my own. It always belonged to my parents, or my teachers, or my job (as a server at a restaurant called Steak n’ Shake—I had to wear a red tie), or my volleyball team. Time is a resource, like money, and you are now richer, so much richer than I can ever remember being until I left my hometown to go to college. In this post, I want to give you some ideas of how you could spend your riches. Idea #1: Read whatever you want. If my mom hadn’t gotten me a library card, I would be a different person today. As a student, I remember feeling like I never had any choices, but my mom would always let me choose which books I wanted to check out in the library. In the summers, before I could drive, Mom would take my sister and me to the library once a week, and I’d check out so many books, maybe ten. I’d read them all by the public pool, or in my room, or in the neighborhood park, and check out another ten books, until the summer was over, and the stuff I read was decided once again by teachers. The following is a list of resources to help you find more freely chosen books you might like, which also happen to be free.
Unfortunately, the Houston Public Library announced it would close its doors to the public. If you already have a library card (or you know someone who does), you can still access all of their digital content for free. They have different digital platforms where you can check out ebooks, audiobooks, movies, shows, music, and graphic novels for free. Hoopla is my favorite. They also have study resources, like Brainfuse, which has a Writing Lab where you can get real feedback on your writing from real people, and Skill Surfer, which has all kinds of study help. Project Gutenberg has hundreds of free books, mostly older books. A good place to start is their list of the Top 100 most downloaded books. I personally recommend Dracula by Bram Stoker (did you know that the vampire myth originated to explain infectious disease?), The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Wattpad is a platform where writers can immediately connect with readers by self-publishing. A student recommended it to me. A lot of the authors themselves are young people, so a lot of the writing is written with you in mind as the reader. If you don’t have a library card, you can check out digital books from Open Library. They have a newer, more up-to-date catalogue compared to Project Gutenberg. If graphic novels are your thing (and I know they are for at least some of you), Webtoons offers free ones. Unlike Wattpad, I actually use this platform to read all kinds of graphic novels. My absolute favorites are Annarasumanara, House of Stars, Muted, unOrdinary, and Lore Olympus. More graphic novels, of the manga persuasion. Also, lot’s of anime, including my favorite, Sailor Moon. Idea #2: Journal Guys, whether we like it or not, we are living through history. This virus is one of those things that we will remember, like Mr. George my old neighbor remembered the first sounds of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and like my math teacher Mr. Bush remembered his classmates crying in the hallways of his high school after the assassination of JFK. Those kinds of memories are valuable because they shed light on the experiences of real people living in real life during crazy times. Journaling is writing without boundaries, writing whatever you want to write about what is happening to you and your family, and how you are feeling in reaction to anything at all. You don’t have to journal about the coronavirus, in fact, you don’t have to journal at all. You are rich with time, and you get to decide what to spend it on. But I think journaling even a little bit every day is a valuable way to spend some of your time riches. For those of you who are all about the apps, there are some really great journaling ones out there. Second Everyday helps you create a documentary out of your days, almost like a moving photo essay. Day One Journal helps you create multimedia posts about your life, with photos and text. And DayGram has you journal only one line a day, for the busiest, no-nonsense journalers among us. For those of you who are more artistically bent, I encourage you to look into creating an art journal. Some summers ago, I took a class at the Glassell Art in art journaling, and I loved it. Idea #3: Learn about a random thing that interests you.
Now is the time to learn something just for you, something led by your own interests. Interested in art? Check out these free coloring pages from art museums around the world. Or go on a virtual tour of Paris museums. Interested in music? Watch one of the Met’s scheduled operas for free, listen to world-famous cello master Yo-Yo Ma serenade the world with songs of comfort, or hear this quarantined Italian opera singer share his music with his neighbors. Interested in animals? Check out one of the Cincinnati Zoo’s virtual safaris. Interested in yoga? The Down Dog app has made all of their content free for a limited time to help people exercise in a time of social distancing. Interested in something else? Take a free class with edX, Open Culture, or Coursera. You can find courses in almost anything, from world-renowned institutions like Harvard or MIT. A friend recommended this poetry course to me, which I just enrolled in. (Update: I dropped it. Just wasn't for me. I've decided to try to learn all the different kinds of trees in my neighborhood instead.) Idea #4: Ummm… Catch up with your free choice reading novels? If you’ve fallen behind in your free choice dialectical journals, you have a chance to catch up now. If a student has made a failing grade on their research project, I have excused that grade. The research project isn’t as well-suited to working at home as your free choice novel. If you are concerned about your grade, please make-up your free choice dialectical journals, and let me know so I can grade it with either the brand-new Remind technology, or with good old-fashioned email ([email protected]). I’m opening the Google Classroom windows (with no due dates for now) for all the rest of the dialectical journals in case any among you wish to work ahead and move on from your free choice novel to hopefully another, even freer choice novel. That was the last of the VERY LONG POST ideas. Please stay safe and healthy out there. If you need anything or have any questions about anything at all, email me or message me through Remind. You can also just comment on this post, although keep in mind that it would be a public comment that everyone will see. Sometime this week, you should get a phone call from the school or the district checking in on you and checking on your from-home technology accessibility and such. |
AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher in the Spring of 2020. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined English II classroom. Archives
May 2020
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