mrmoses
Okay, maybe, possibly, I’m off hiatus. (Probably not). I just want to take a second, get my head above water, and talk about something I did this Friday.
At my school we have to use every possible means of contacting students. We are truly in the struggle to save lives and contact by any means necessary has to happen. Although I am strong in communicating with my students by email, and blog, and video, one of the areas I know that I have been weak in over the last six weeks in by using the plain old phone. This is not a good place to be weak because I know that’s where most of my student’s parents exist. They’re not watching YouTube but they do have a cell phone in their pocket.
I needed a way to get over this weakness, quick.
Many months ago my source of all things good on the web, Mashable, mentioned a new service called PhoneVite.
PhoneVite allows you to make mass phone calls and collect a response. So, this Friday I placed a phone call to sixty-or-so students that I am concerned about. Let me walk you through the process:
- Set up a PhoneVite account and set my cell-phone as the caller ID number (I couldn’t use my work number because I’m behind an extension).
- Recorded the message I wanted to send out using the same headset I use for Skype (but you can do this by phone as well).
- Bought $20 worth of phone calls from PhoneVite.
- Inserted the phone numbers I wanted to call.
- Clicked send.
- Watched both my work and cell phone explode for about 20 minutes.
Now, there’s a lot of talk about how parents aren’t involved in their students education. I’ve got about 20 minutes of evidence that would refute that. My work phone wouldn’t stop ringing. My cell phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. There were calls that I missed in that 20 minutes because both of the lines were tied up. In short, it was awesome.
$2.85 and ten minutes later all sixty phone calls had been placed and all but two connected. PhoneVite shows the amount of time that the call was listened to and all that connected made it though the entire 50 second recorded message. Only one family blocked future calls from PhoneVite (one of the options offered at the end of the call) but it provided the number that asked to be blocked, so next time I’ll just make a personal call to them.
In the future I’m going to use more of the features in PhoneVite to poll parents and get feedback but for this first round I couldn’t be happier with the results.
Technorati Tags: phonevite, using old technology in new ways, hey is that my horn? Let me toot it for a second
One of the things that I often tell teachers is that I think that they should never hesitate to bring their own personal experiences into the classroom. Teachers are often shy about that. They think that it’s sort of unprofessional. You know - teach the syllabus, teach the textbook, teach the stuff that you want to teach, but don’t bring in your own life and your own experiences. But after all, every teacher - maybe the teacher has not had the the kind of experiences I have had - but all teachers have lived certain kinds of experiences, which made them who they are. And whatever those experiences are, whatever led to a change in consciousness of those teachers, students should know about that. And I discovered this: that whenever I brought into the classroom my own experiences, the interest of the students suddenly quickened. I don’t want to to say that before I brought my experiences in my students were asleep. I like to think that half of them were awake. But certainly when I began to bring my own life into it, my own experiences, yes students’ interest always quickened. A lot of teachers don’t understand this; students always want to know who their teachers are, who they really are, behind the textbook, behind the syllabus, what their lives are like, what they went through, and what they’re thinking about. I always resented it when I was a student and I spent a semester or a year with a teacher and at the end of the semester and and the end of the year I didn’t know where that teacher stood. I thought there was something missing there.Howard Zinn - Original Zinn
Technorati Tags: My hiatus will rise like lions after slumber
Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with things.John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916
Technorati Tags: John Dewey, You Wouldn’t Believe Me if I Told You That My Graduate Level Curriculum Professor Thought that John Dewey Was the Guy that Invented the Decimal System Would You?
The day I stop tilting at windmills is the day I quit this job.
I’m wondering if anyone wants to take a shot at drawing the lines between these three things:
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Exhibit 3
“Let me try to explain how it feels to see again and again material you should once have learned but didn’t.
You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expressions containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for years. Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple versions, anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions, and now you’re not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.
Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story characters: trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: “If one train is going this fast . . .” or “This shadow is really one line of a triangle . . . .” Then: “Let’s see . . .” “How did the Jones do this?” “Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention wavers. You wonder about other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but th tensions wins out and your attention flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration.
The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: “That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the troubling histories many of these students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make deliverance from these classes possible. ”
-Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary
See you all when I see you all.
Photo Credit: Alec Courosa - EduPunk Version 1 on Flickr
(and not this Hiatus for all you edupunks out there)
Technorati Tags: And that’s the way it was … and that’s the way it is … and it’s always changing … and it is always the same.
During my first year as an administrator there was one thing that helped me keep my sanity more than any thing else I tried.
I had the opportunity to teach about 100 students American Government. It’s another thing that I’m passionate about. I think that most of the time this class is taught as a straight-up-and-down course on things like the three branches of government and the furthering studies of the way of the old-rich-white-dead male. I take a bit different tact.
Anyhow here’s how things turned out this year:
As a Bell Curve Like Line Graph
As a Bar Type Bar Graph
A Word About Failure Rates
My failure rate (yes, my, me, mine) was at 14, nearly 15, percent this year. There’s nothing remarkable about this. I should have fought harder for each of these students. No excuses. Their failure is truly my failure.
A Word About Attrition
Although a few of these students left to find other schools, such as those that allow students to complete their first year or two of college while finishing their last year or two of college, most of these students dropped-out. I also have the realization that the students who failed in this class are at a huge risk of dropping-out.
Although I realize that there is a systematic issue for the students who failed and dropped out I realize my role as part of that system and how little I truly did to change that structure for those students.
Technorati Tags: if i can’t save them all then i don’t want to play, reflections
I know that I should be fired up about NECC. I’m fired up about ISTE and the new NETS for teachers and EduBloggerCon (especially EduBloggerCon), but I’m still having a tough time committing to going.
I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why.
I think it would be good for my soul to get together with the people from my network and people who are in the same fight that I’m in. Actually I know that it would be good.
Then why can’t I just decide to go?
Is it Texas? Is it the number of people? Is it the meat-market of the vendor floors? Is it Texas?
Can anyone out there give me a good push?
Technorati Tags: necc, texas, if I go I’ll have a reason to use the blog post title “death and texas”, why can’t necc be in austin. that’s almost like not being in texas
I don’t have a lot of routines, but one that I fall into every baseball season is watching Sports Center in the morning. You see, during the rest of the year I have the news to keep my hopes down and my desire to crawl back in bed up. During the baseball season I’ve got the Dodgers to do that for me.
As luck would have it this morning I sat down not during baseball highlights. Per the routine this means that I can pay far less than half attention and convince myself that this counts as sleep.
Here’s what I was able to ascertain from my psudo-sleep: It seems that there’s a championship series going on, or about to go on, or something, for a non-baseball type sport. As I was dropping into a further level of zone-out and waiting for the Royals/Sox highlights I thought I heard:
What?
Ubuntu.
There. They said it again. As I shifted my eye sight from blurry eating mode, not much eye sight needed to shovel food in the ol’ gullet, to something near focusing I began to see the Celtics on the screen and decided that I’d finally lost it. This was going to drive me insane. And at the end of this school year it was going to be a very short drive. Why would anyone be talking about Ubuntu and the Celtics. Must. Go. Back. To. Half. Sleep. Then they said it again.
Ubuntu.
Crap. I was going to have to focus on something that wasn’t baseball. Then the world became a bit more strange.
Turns out that the Celtics use “Ubuntu” as some sort-of battle cry.
Neat.
It’s a lot better cry than “We’re waiting for Windows 7″. By now I was awake enough to put off thoughts of an OpenSource NBA team and Magic vs. Bird, finish breakfast, and go to work.
Strange stuff and not at all an unfitting way to start the last day of this school year.
Weezer has a new video out:
If you recognize most of the references in this video you may be spending too much time on the internet. In case you just wish you spent more time on the internet here’s a list from the bastion of all things internet, Albino Black Sheep.
The best part happens here:
Because while you know that most of us got a good laugh from the the Crying Britney Spears Guy (not to mention the rest of the internet celebs) the fact is most of them (perhaps most of us) just needed a good hug. Here’s to hoping that the internet hasn’t turned us in to a society of dicks.
Of course there’s lots (and lots) of evidence to the contrary:
