The Margins of Education

I want to start by thanking all of the parents that stopped by my classroom during Open House last night. I'm new to Orcutt Academy so it was great to get further acquainted with the community and the parents of the students I see everyday in class. The conversations I had were very helpful and gave me some more ideas of how I can better focus my class to meet the diverse needs of students.

Today, English 11 reflected on the writing we did during the last period and AP began looking at the arguments that their summer reading texts made.

English 11 - We started off class by sharing the writing that students completed during their time outside. All students shared with a partner or group and some students shared with the entire class. I really enjoyed hearing what the students came up with for this open assignment and I got a good peak into their thought processes and method of approaching assignments. I find that getting this peak into their minds can help me better design activities and the way that I approach course material and assignments. I also found myself frequently impressed by the quality of work, openness of thought, and sensitivity of ideas that students produced. After sharing work, students wrote for ten minutes about how this process of writing differed from the processes they typically use for completing school assignments. We used these reflections to help us better understand how American Romantics wrote and got at truths about the world. I also made students aware that they could use this process as an alternate way of producing ideas for school assignments where they felt blocked. As a former college writing tutor and instructor, I've found that the students that are most successful are the ones capable of initiating and choosing between a variety of writing processes as they approach a goal. At the end, I spent some time previewing next week where we will be working with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

AP - Today, we focused on the two texts students read for summer reading - Richard Rodriquez's Hunger of Memory and Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary.  The students spent time by themselves identifying the types of arguments their text was making and pulling out key quotes where the author was making those arguments.  This activity helped strengthen the argument identification skills that will be necessary for rhetorical analysis and critical reading both on the AP exam and in their future careers.  After the solo work, the students worked in groups and shared arguments from both texts.  They then compared and contrasted the authors.  We used the group work as a jumping board for a larger class discussion about the texts and their similarities and differences.  I found the large class discussion tremendously rewarding - it was by far the most intellectually complex conversation we have had so far.  During it, students assessed both writer's arguments, along with their strengths and weaknesses.  We also channeled the diverse experience of the writers and the students in the room to have some excellent conversation about bilingual education, remedial labeling, affirmative action and vocational training.  As the students left, I felt that we were definitely beginning a year that would allow us to approach complex issues using our diverse experiences in a productive academic manner.  In fact,  I was so excited about the possibilities that I threw a reading of Richard Rodriguez's second book Days of Obligation into my reading plans for the weekend so that I would be more capable of rounding out our conversation and providing students with additional information.