Blog
February 1, 2012:
Today we wrote paragraphs. In keeping with our "less is more" strategy, we are focusing on mastering one main idea with our paragraph writing exercises. For the Native Sons unit, the main idea (and the question they will be required to answer on the test) is: "Why did President Grant finally give citizenship to Native Americans?"
Each student had to write one sentence answering that question on the board, with the others correcting as necessary. Here was the result:
This exercise has two purposes. The first is to force students to craft a complete sentence from bullet point notes. This has been hard for them because they don’t know many transition words and they often fail to use the proper tense or verb. The second purpose is to reinforce attention to detail through spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Last time we did this exercise, their paragraphs were a mess. These were much better, and even their penmanship has improved.
January 26, 2012:
Last week we took a "detour day," which I occasionally do when the students exhibit an abiding interest in something outside our normal curriculum. Patricia in particular is fascinated by the Holocaust. She can't enough information about it, so one day we took a break from our Native Sons lesson and I showed the whole class this video of Adolf Hitler addressing a Hitler Youth rally at Nuremberg in 1934:
They were completely mesmerized by this speech. It just goes to show how Hitler, eighty years after the fact, still has a powerful effect on audiences. They weren't able to read the subtitles fast enough to understand his words, but they were almost irrelevant. The students were transfixed by the trappings of the group meeting - the flags, the uniforms, the cheering, the drums, the trumpets. They also related to the fact that Hitler was speaking to kids about their age (13 and 14). Remember, I said, within ten years Hitler would send these boys to die by the millions from the snows of Russia to the sands of North Africa. I asked if they would have been persuaded by Hitler's message. They adamantly denied it, confident they could see through his facade.
I then reminded them that Hitler had risen to power by exploiting the victim mentality. Germany was a victim of the Versailles Treaty, the West, Communism, and of course the Jews. The desire, even obsession, to seek revenge against a particular group - be it a race, ethnicity, or social class - was and is a powerful motivator in political movements. By casting Germans as victims, Hitler relieved them of the responsibility to think or act for themselves.
The result? Well, we talked about that too. We watched this video from our Holocaust lesson:
You could hear a pin drop in that classroom. An INTENSE day, but very productive.
December 8, 2011:
Today we played the Memory Game, where students match questions and answers from the lesson plan. For example, one card says "the number of Supreme Court justices," another card says "nine," and the students must match these two cards out of 42 total.
The Period 2 group did better than Period 4 and actually finished the game. It is interesting to note which students did better at this game than, say, Hangman (a vocabulary exercise that gets the nod for most popular). Patricia is one of my stragglers. At the beginning of the semester, she had the hardest time reading of the Period 4 students. She did VERY well at the Memory Game, however. She did an especially good job of matching famous Supreme Court cases with their correct answers.
Our primary objective for this unit is to get the students to identify the difference between state and federal courts, and hence state and federal governments. These are still abstractions to them. As adults, the distinction is second nature to us, but to 13- and 14-year olds without our breadth of experience, we might as well be talking astrophysics.
They are finally starting to grasp the difference between the two, as well as the Constitution's purpose in keeping power decentralized (ref. Brandon's question in my last post). Also, many of these kids have relatives in jail - it's just the nature of the population I work with. One student asked me why there are so many different courts. His uncle had been arrested and held in a city jail, but was transferred to the state pen in Canon City because of his prior convictions. A useful opportunity, believe it or not, for explaining what city, state, and federal courts do. As it so happens, just down the road from Canon City is Florence, Colorado, where the federal Supermax prison is located. This is where Manuel Noriega (former dictator of Panama), Aldrich Ames (former CIA spy who sold secrets to the Russians) and Ted Kazinski (Unabomber) are held. They committed federal crimes, so they were prosecuted in federal courts and sent to federal prisons. That seemed to register with my kids.
Other good teaching opportunities: explaining the commerce clause. Nobody even knew what "commerce" meant, but there is a suburb of Denver called Commerce City, where most of our industry is located. There's a railyard and oil refinery there, so we made the connection between Commerce City and "business" or "trade." Also, segregation. Brown v. Board of Education is the one case I really want them to remember out of the six we're studying. This unit's opening video talked specifically of the case and of segregation in general. Several students recalled this, and were able to define segregation as "separate."
Comments or questions: info@americaandtheworld.com
December 14, 2011:
Today we reviewed the vocabulary for the Supreme Court unit by playing Hangman. This game has been around for awhile, and most of you are probably familiar with the analog version, but we've put it online for our purposes. The two words covered in this segment are "belie" and "exclusively." Check out the video, it's pretty entertaining. As those of you who teach middle school know, it's like herding cats, so while I'm explaining the Constitution to one of them, the rest are chattering on about who knows what. There are six students in this class, plus one of the student's mothers showed up to see what all the buzz was about with our program. Her daughter has done exceptionally well with AATW, and she wanted to get a taste of it in the classroom.
I always have one of the students operate my laptop while I stand up and MC the whole thing. Today Gabe and Naidelyn wanted to sit in the driver's seat, so it's their voices you hear closest to the microphone.
One thing you can't hear through all the noise is when Justin correctly guesses "exclusively" with just the "e" chosen in the puzzle. Justin is POSITIVE he's going to be a rapper someday, so I told him if he ever hit the big time he would probably end up at the Viper Club - an exclusive Hollywood nightclub (or at least it used to be) owned by Johnny Depp and others. All I had to do was mention Viper Club and he instantly recalled the word - whatever makes the connection!
Dec. 6, 2011
Welcome to our blog! We're going to track our results this semester at one of the middle schools where our chief instructor is teaching. It's an "at risk" school, meaning its students are especially at risk of not graduating from high school. It is part of Denver Public Schools, 90% minority (mainly Hispanic), and 80% of its students are receiving free or reduced lunches.
We began our intervention on September 22, and as of today have completed 17 hours of instruction per student. We're teaching six students in period 2 (8:00-9:00 AM) and seven students in period 4 (10:00-11:00 AM). All have been identified as "partially proficient" or "unsatisfactory" on the reading and/or writing parts of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP).
These students are pulled out of a conventional Social Studies classroom, leaving the teacher with 23 and 22 students in his period 2 and period 4 classes, respectively. Our chief instructor then works in a separate classroom with the intervention group, using America and the World (AATW) curriculum. He follows the syllabus of the conventional Social Studies class, which is covering civics this semester, and began with AATW's Congress unit. They are now about half way through the Supreme Court unit.
It was TOUGH SLEDDING for the first month. Most of the students struggled with reading through an entire paragraph, but by the time they began the Supreme Court unit on November 15, their fluency had drastically improved. This was also about the same time that they began to ask questions. This was our first indication that they were coming to grips with the material, and it came about during a discussion of some basic civics facts.
Brandon asked why the Senate had to confirm the President's nominees to the Supreme Court. In his mind, it was better if the President simply appointed justices to the Court and that was that. The fact that the Constitution was designed to control, limit, and balance power among the three branches of government had not really sunk in until he asked this question.
We hope this is just the beginning! In the coming weeks we'll discuss the results from their Supreme Court post-tests. If you care to share your classroom experiences or ask any questions, e-mail us at info@americaandtheworld.com.