Oh boy, do I feel better about lesson planning after this morning's session!
C, M and I had LibrarianS. She was great, really helpful without doing the thinking for us. I think that as a group we thought of some great ideas for M's hypothetical Latin class. The culture angle is harder to manage when you're using a "dead" language! We were trying to tie in technology, Pompeii and translating classical Latin (since that's pretty much the point of a high school Latin class), and we came up with an activity that I think could work for a broad range of contexts: have the class create Twitter accounts of historical figures, contemporary to the event being discussed (in this case Pompeii's volcano incident), and have the characters react to prompts and interact with each other. The students could incorporate a great number of cultural details, and the activity speaks right to my creative-writer heart!
C and I talked about using German newspapers to get information about the tsunami. Students could compare those sources to American sources, or compare the German sources to each other, such as das Bild vs. der Spiegel (click the links; you don't have to understand German to make a guess about which source has more accurate information).
LibrarianS asked a question that helped lesson planning make a lot more sense to me: do you see this activity as a beginning or an end? That is, is it a building block for the beginning of a unit, or is it a culminating activity? C saw it as an end, whereas I saw it as a beginning. Our assessments and activities looked different as a result (summative vs. formative, I'm learning things!).
A word about the Brandon center: it is awesome and I want to spend all of my time in there. I'm a person who loves color; it energizes and inspires me. It felt wonderful to be ensconced in an orange nook, out of which I could see glimpses of lime green and purple. I also enjoyed hooking up my computer to the TV. It wasn't completely necessary, but I had never done that with my computer before, and I wanted to jump on the opportunity to learn how to do it now rather than wait until I have a class full of kids watching me try to figure things out on the fly.
Back to librarians. When I get a teaching job, I hope it will be at a school with librarians like the ones we got to work with today. LibrarianS helped me go from feeling a little lost to excitedly spouting ideas. I didn't even eat a snack this morning, that's how absorbed I was!
...okay, so I also wasn't sure we were allowed to eat in the booths.
-B
YAY! (And I was nervous about my Coke being in that beautiful place, too!)
ReplyDeleteI thought your group had a really good vibe. I'm delighted you had a great day.
Sue's question about beginnings and ends struck me too. It's a great question and needs to be considered for pretty much every activity we do. It's interesting how a topic can change so much being a beginning vs. being an end...and it's pretty cool too.
ReplyDeleteI concur with your opinion of the Brandon Center.
Our librarian was concerned about the food/drink issue in the Brandon Center, too. Eventually she saw Kristin with her Coke and said "Well, she's got a Coke..." and busted out a Diet Coke from her bag. Those librarians, such rebels!
ReplyDeleteThe question about an activity or assignment being a "beginning" or and "ending" assignment is something we talked about, too, in a way. We mainly discussed what order our activities should be done in and if certain discussions or assignments could be a culmination of what students have learned up to that point in the unit/class/whatever. One of the discussion points I thought should be covered in our group's lesson ended up being something that students could have brought together their thoughts from the other activities on, and would have been useful in helping them prepare for our final assessment: a response essay that asked them to draw evidence from each of the lessons.
Yes, it was a really great class! I'm sure I made this point (multiple times) during our session, but I was so excited and relieved to find out about so many cool Latin resources online. And although Latin is a little more obscure than German, I enjoyed collaborating with people who understand my pain in the under-appreciated language category! Also, I love food.
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