Moving forward, then...
The silence was quickly shattered and suspended animation sped up to real time again. All is well in that department.
And the majority of you still have no clue what I've been talking about so cryptically for nearly 2 months. Mwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!!! Maybe you'll figure it out. Or keep reading every new post until I finally decide to tell you what's going on. Hey, I have to keep all 12 of you reading somehow, right?
OK, 12 was a generous number. I meant 5.
Onward!
Today I was originally going to do a "This Week in the News" blog. There's so much to talk about: Harriet Miers, Hurricane Wilma, the Iraq death toll reaching 2000, Walmart's ideas for revamping their health benefits...
Most of which would lead to me ranting incoherently about political stuff. And I didn't feel like doing that.
So I thought I'd talk about celebrity gossip. Mainly this whole story about Janet Jackson having a daughter that no one's known about for 18 years. Geez louisey do I feel sorry for that girl (if she really does exist). Especially if she knows that Janet Jackson's her mom. Imagine the kind of drama that must dredge up.
But then again, should we really care about this whole thing? Do we care?
So no more celebrity gossip for today. Except for the fact that I'm happy that Britney Spears raised hell when pictures of her new baby were posted on the internet. Maybe she's actually going to do her best to be a mommy and we won't be innundated with the whole "Britney's baby" thing. But I still remain wary and do not retract any of the (potentially) hilarious things I said here when we all found out about the pregnancy.
Right then, down to business...
So I've been struggling with one of my new jobs as a assistant teacher for an afterschool drama program. There was this curriculum that was handed to us that we were going to use to put on this great workshop for these 7th graders and it was going to be a beautiful thing at the end of the semester when they had the finished product.
You know the phrase "looks great on paper?"
Ok. The idea of this workshop is to help these 7th graders develop a sense of identity and self-esteem by creating an autobiographical scrapbook that would be put on a CD-ROM at the end of the project.
But where's the theater part, you ask.
The first 15 minutes or so of each session are to be devoted to theater games and such, and the games are to be used as tools for opening the kids up and getting the juices flowing for this scrapbook.
Still looks awesome on paper. Does not work with our kids.
The school that I'm working in is an Abbott district. The kids that we've had in the program so far, while definitely in need of developing their self esteem and identity, are not responding to the workshop. The curriculum calls for a lot of writing. Not only do these kids hate to write, they don't have the level of writing skills that would make the project successful. The curriculum also calls for a lot of the work to be done outside of school, on the students' own time. Well, it's an afterschool program. The students don't face any penalties for not completing the assignments.
The afterschool program itself is unorganized at best, chaotic at worst. The students get to decide whether or not they want to go to "Drama Club" that day. We've had a revolving door of the seventh graders that come to the afterschool. By now, they all agree that Drama Club is corny.
So now we've got to revamp this program so we'll actually have students to teach. I have no idea what we should do.
I don't relate to these kids very well. It's an instance in which all of my suburban upbringing in gifted programs and AP classes have given me a completely different view of what public school education is/was/should be. While I was working on a 10-page term paper discussing the effect of television violence on children (in the 7th grade, mind you. 8th grade's paper tackled affirmative action), these kids can barely spell the word "circumstances" and write things in Spanish when they can't come up with the English words. And they're growing up waaaayyy too fast. Case in point: one girl mentioned in passing that for her 13th birthday she's going to get her tounge pierced and a tattoo along her bikini line that says "Sexy ____". Apparently she felt that she couldn't tell us what the second word is going to be.
I was speechless. In my mind I was shaking the girl by her shoulders and screaming, "Child, what the hell is wrong with you?!?" She's only 12 right now! She's still a little girl in a lot of ways, and she's talking about tattoos?
So how do we rework this program so that the kids will want to stay in? I would feel so much better if I knew that I was in charge of these kids for just a few hours a week instead of them running around and doing god knows what. Stay tuned...
And the majority of you still have no clue what I've been talking about so cryptically for nearly 2 months. Mwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!!! Maybe you'll figure it out. Or keep reading every new post until I finally decide to tell you what's going on. Hey, I have to keep all 12 of you reading somehow, right?
OK, 12 was a generous number. I meant 5.
Onward!
Today I was originally going to do a "This Week in the News" blog. There's so much to talk about: Harriet Miers, Hurricane Wilma, the Iraq death toll reaching 2000, Walmart's ideas for revamping their health benefits...
Most of which would lead to me ranting incoherently about political stuff. And I didn't feel like doing that.
So I thought I'd talk about celebrity gossip. Mainly this whole story about Janet Jackson having a daughter that no one's known about for 18 years. Geez louisey do I feel sorry for that girl (if she really does exist). Especially if she knows that Janet Jackson's her mom. Imagine the kind of drama that must dredge up.
But then again, should we really care about this whole thing? Do we care?
So no more celebrity gossip for today. Except for the fact that I'm happy that Britney Spears raised hell when pictures of her new baby were posted on the internet. Maybe she's actually going to do her best to be a mommy and we won't be innundated with the whole "Britney's baby" thing. But I still remain wary and do not retract any of the (potentially) hilarious things I said here when we all found out about the pregnancy.
Right then, down to business...
So I've been struggling with one of my new jobs as a assistant teacher for an afterschool drama program. There was this curriculum that was handed to us that we were going to use to put on this great workshop for these 7th graders and it was going to be a beautiful thing at the end of the semester when they had the finished product.
You know the phrase "looks great on paper?"
Ok. The idea of this workshop is to help these 7th graders develop a sense of identity and self-esteem by creating an autobiographical scrapbook that would be put on a CD-ROM at the end of the project.
But where's the theater part, you ask.
The first 15 minutes or so of each session are to be devoted to theater games and such, and the games are to be used as tools for opening the kids up and getting the juices flowing for this scrapbook.
Still looks awesome on paper. Does not work with our kids.
The school that I'm working in is an Abbott district. The kids that we've had in the program so far, while definitely in need of developing their self esteem and identity, are not responding to the workshop. The curriculum calls for a lot of writing. Not only do these kids hate to write, they don't have the level of writing skills that would make the project successful. The curriculum also calls for a lot of the work to be done outside of school, on the students' own time. Well, it's an afterschool program. The students don't face any penalties for not completing the assignments.
The afterschool program itself is unorganized at best, chaotic at worst. The students get to decide whether or not they want to go to "Drama Club" that day. We've had a revolving door of the seventh graders that come to the afterschool. By now, they all agree that Drama Club is corny.
So now we've got to revamp this program so we'll actually have students to teach. I have no idea what we should do.
I don't relate to these kids very well. It's an instance in which all of my suburban upbringing in gifted programs and AP classes have given me a completely different view of what public school education is/was/should be. While I was working on a 10-page term paper discussing the effect of television violence on children (in the 7th grade, mind you. 8th grade's paper tackled affirmative action), these kids can barely spell the word "circumstances" and write things in Spanish when they can't come up with the English words. And they're growing up waaaayyy too fast. Case in point: one girl mentioned in passing that for her 13th birthday she's going to get her tounge pierced and a tattoo along her bikini line that says "Sexy ____". Apparently she felt that she couldn't tell us what the second word is going to be.
I was speechless. In my mind I was shaking the girl by her shoulders and screaming, "Child, what the hell is wrong with you?!?" She's only 12 right now! She's still a little girl in a lot of ways, and she's talking about tattoos?
So how do we rework this program so that the kids will want to stay in? I would feel so much better if I knew that I was in charge of these kids for just a few hours a week instead of them running around and doing god knows what. Stay tuned...
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