The song for today was one that I love to start my training runs to. Here's a picture of the result of all that training: with my Uncle Andy (who has run almost 100 marathons) after the Portland Marathon last year - my first ever full 26.2 miles! :-)
Dear class,
I am always somewhat hesitant to run the "forced choice" activity if I haven't done it with students before, just because I am afraid that it is totally going to bomb and the point (of disagreement) won't be proven. I was so happy with the result today! Lots of great discussion and I think I managed to get just about everyone involved. Way to go! Read on for the recap:
Essential Questions: What brings people together? What tears people apart?
Soundtrack: “Shake it Out” by
Florence + The Machine. Chosen because I like to start my runs with this song, and we are starting a new week/unit. I went for a 10 mile training run this last weekend. A few of you asked what my time was. I wasn't aiming to push it and much of it was uphill, so it took me 1:29:12. I really love the Nike + app - here's a map with the pace and elevation of my run. For context, I ran 13.1 miles last May in 1:32. Here are the lyrics to the song.
AGENDA 2/25/13:
News Brief
Feedback Review
Forced Choice
Homework: Read
the blog! The next
news brief is assigned to Kayla.
News Brief: After checking in about the weekend and discussing the Oscars for a bit, Tia introduced this article as her news brief: CNN.com - Fighter jet crash in Yemen's capital kills 10. We discussed how the US is involved in Yemen and the concept of drone warfare to kill those suspected of terrorism - which was another theme we talked about with the forced choice activity. Thank you, Tia!
Feedback Review: Another element of my classes that I thoroughly enjoy doing. I read all of your responses from last class about what is going well and what needs to be improved on and combined them into a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide used wordle.net "word clouds" to show the impact of words being frequently used across the class. The second slide for each question was what you all actually wrote to me. Here is the presentation if you wanted to see it again:
My general impressions were that the class enjoys the atmosphere we create and knows it needs to work on being quieter. Also, that I am doing a good job of being relatable, bringing the energy and interesting content, and explaining things, while I need to work on various different areas like notes, activities, and strictness (we talked a bit in class about this). Thank you again for providing the feedback! I think it should be useful going forward.
Forced Choice: Again, I LOVED this. So many great opinions here. I believe we were able to have a smart discussion that respected our individual viewpoints (and hopefully was not boring). We only got through the first five statements (out of 15), so next class we will probably continue where we left off - though I will just pick and choose the rest of the 10 to go over. At the end you will be writing a reflection on the most difficult choice you had to make and how these sorts of questions could make people want to change the form of government they have (via a revolution). I hope you enjoyed this activity as much as I did! I would love to hear more thoughts and feedback in the comments, if you are interested in doing so.
We obviously did not get to the end of this activity, or start the reflection, so even though I said at the beginning of the class that it would be homework if not completed during class, it absolutely is NOT homework. We will work in class next time on it.
We obviously did not get to the end of this activity, or start the reflection, so even though I said at the beginning of the class that it would be homework if not completed during class, it absolutely is NOT homework. We will work in class next time on it.
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