If you saw CBS' Sunday Morning Show, you may have seen the segment dealing with creativity. I wish I had the fore-thought to start the DVR when it came on, but now-a-days, I am sure there is a version "downloadable" (new verb I just made up) on YouTube. The summer class I might get to teach has got me focused on collecting examples of creativity across the content areas. I am looking for art, technology, science anything! This segment was perfect. It captured the spirit of creativity I was hoping to encourage in potential creative writing students. Creativity comes in so many shapes, sizes, areas and ideas. How can I bring more of that into all of my classes?
This weekend my "Smart Board" is being installed. I have been waiting for this thing since October. One of the coolest things I can do is hook up my Kindle to the board and point out specific passages and ideas to students. This is will definitely come into play in the summer. I can just imagine reading items together, examining sentences, words and ideas interactively. The potential for lessons just shot through the roof! I have one lesson I have been dying to do again, now that I have a permanent Smart Board... there's no waiting. One website I enjoy using is a Create your Own Comic site. I use this to help students grasp the idea of inference and using text clues to draw conclusions. The kids look at the position of different characters and create the potential dialogue for said characters. We take turns showing one another different scenes, writing different dialogue and moving/working backwards.
It has been brought to my attention one of the teachers in the high school is thinking of retiring at the end of this year, but definitely by next year. This has got me thinking about putting in for a transfer to teacher AP and Gemini classes. A lot of training is involved. I don't want to say the job is more labor intensive than what I do now... but it is a different type of laboring. Seniors in high school need 12th grade English to graduate. They're writing serious reserach papers and preparing for their entrance into the workforce or post secondary education. Having recently done these things I feel like I have an advantage on one side... conversely I questions whether I can weather the transition from middle school.
I love middle school. I love the students, I work with amazing teachers. My principal allows for collaboration and ideas to flow freely (not that the high school principal wouldn't, I don't know really...) but I am.... comfortable. I have always wanted to teach the classics... encourage the dicsussion and controversy that comes with this literature. But part of me wonders if that's still what I want.
When I first got into teaching, I pictured myself discussing William Golding and Shakespeare, Harper Lee and Chaucer... I didn't think I'd be fearing a state test, introducing how to write an essay and using the lyrics of Miley Cyrus songs to help teach poetry and rhyme scheme...
From this uncertainty can come great rewards... I think about a quotation I love from Neiztche
"One must experience chaos in life to give birth to a dancing star." Or something incredibly close to that... I will have to track down my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Ideas??
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