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. Comments are closed.
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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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