My Opening Gambit

21 July 2006

I'm still working out all the details of this schedule, but it's what I've been thinking about so I figured I might as well make it into a blog.

The first three to four days I think I will dedicate mostly to class procedures and rules. In these classes, the students will decorate their work folder (which will contain their tests/quizzes/projects), rehearse all of the classroom procedures, and later I might use a journaling activity to demonstrate how I expect the class to run on a daily basis.

More specifically, in my math classes I want to talk about asking questions/giving answers in terms of problem solving. I want to let my students know upfront that I will not be giving them as many answers as they may be used to; Plato's Meno might help me focus this lesson on classroom structure. In Reading, I want to talk about rules in terms of Calvin Ball (although I may do this in all of my classes). I also might stretch this to five days and read either Du Bois or Booker T. Washington (an idea of Ms. Hill's) and use that to talk about the value of education. She reads Washington, but I'm a Du Bois man myself so I might find a relevant passage from his works.

After these four days, I'm planning to jump into some review. I'll give a diagnostic test (now that, hopefully, most of the role issues are taken care of) and plan some review accordingly. In math, it's a little easier to envision this in advance. I'll do a week to two weeks of review just to get people on the same page, then jump into the first lessons in my not-yet-developed curriculum. In Reading, I'll probably just jump into work that looks like the regular curriculum but assess them not so much as a means of documenting progress, but as a way of helping them learn what they need to do to meet my expectations.

After that, it'll hopefully be a matter of just unmooring the curricular ship and embarking on our adventure. I can't pick the crew, but, hopefully, I will have instilled my worthy shipmates with a sense of respect and responsibility for our humble sloop. Avoiding the early (and late) mutiny is a big priority and I'm downright nervous/anxious/scared about how that'll all work out. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.