Good bye

I know I said I wasn't going to "give up" on this blog, but I am sick of blogger.

If you want to read my thoughts on education anymore, head over to Basil on the Wall. I have imported and reposted the stuff since this blog's "rebirth" there, including Scramble for Africa.

I'll be deleting this in a few weeks. Thanks for reading.

Political Parties Project: Student Feedback

During the first semester, I had my AP government students complete a project in which they created their own political parties. They were sorted intro groups by their responses to a political orientation survey (using a Nolan chart so it was a little more fine-grained than the spectrum). They were responsible for creating everything about the party, from a name & logo to a platform, and then they campaigned for President. We did not get to have our debates due to school missed from Hurricane Sandy, but we did get to view their campaign ads before voting. I included a survey with the voting to get a little feedback about the project.

The first survey question was "What was the best part about the project?" The themes that I saw in students responses included working in a group, being creative, creating new ideas on politics, and learning through experience. Some particularly interesting student responses to the question were:

• "Giving students a voice to their beliefs, which are usually written off as naive or subject to change and allowing other students to rally behind what they in turn believe."
• "Realizing that there really is no easy way to please everybody, and that the government does the best that it can...most of the time"
• "The experience of being able to see how parties must come together with differing beliefs to make a compromise
• "The best part of this project was how we got to learn about political campaigns by doing a campaign of our own." 
• "It was something a little bit different then I have ever done before and made class interesting."
• "It was fun working with people that I usually don't talk to and finding out we have some of the same beliefs."

I then asked them "What was the worst part about the project?" There were 6 students who said nothing was! Always nice to hear. Others talked about how hard the platform was to make, unclear directions, issues with their group, and not having time for the debate due to the storm. Some also did not like making the ad as they weren't as comfortable making videos. Some quotes:

• "The actual serious work we had to do, but in reality I loved this project because the work was even manageable."
• "I can't think of anything bad about this project. It was interesting and fun." 
• "It was hard to communicate with my group about the subject and get all of the things done together because it required everybody's opinion all of the time when we could not be together all of the time." 
• "The worst part was agreeing on issues...we all had the same basic idea about our ideal government but butted heads on certain issues."
• "The worst part of this project was that we didn't get to do the debate. I was really looking forward to seeing how it all went with everyone's different points of views."

The last question I asked was how well their party worked together. The answers are a lot harder to code as they gave me specific assessments for their group. There were some issues with communication, some students who were absent for a lot of work days, and one group that had a major personality conflict. I still struggle with the answer to how do you deal with the students who just want to work on their own no matter what, and also cooperative work when you have students with real disabilities related to social skills.

Overall, it seemed that they found the project valuable and fun. I have some ideas for next year on how to make the directions clearer and make it run a little smoother. The biggest thing I am still thinking about is how to help students improve at cooperative work. I may be incorporating it into my skills rubrics for my sort-of SBAR I plan to try with AP next year so I need ideas on how to actually teach and reinforce those skills.

What should the purpose of public education be?

Of all my old posts, I keep coming back to "What is the purpose of public education?" the most.

I still think this is a major part of our problem as a society in dealing with education. We don't agree on what it's for, and we often say we think it's for one thing while legislating based on some completely antagonistic purpose. We expect miracles from a system that we denigrate while simultaneously hero-worshipping and hating the people who work in it.

I gagged during the Presidential debates last fall at the "I think we all love teachers" comment. I shouted at my television about how they sure have a funny way of showing it. (Side note: I tell my students this all the time. They do something ridiculous, I give them The Look, they say "You know I love you, Mrs ---", and I say "You sure have a strange way of showing it.") We talk about how great teachers are one minute and then complain about how lazy they are the next. We say that school is the best way out of poverty and then refuse to truly desegregate or fairly fund schools and then blame the teachers or the students or the parents or anything but the well-documented effects of poverty for our failures.

I'm tired of the talk about needing to improve our public education system so that our kids can compete in the 21st century world. (Read: We better improve our education system so those scary yellow people won't do better than us. I'm sorry, I can't even hear anything but the racist subtext anymore considering how often people immediately point to "oh no, China's growing" to prove that we aren't competing enough any more.) I'm tired of the talk about how education is the answer to our broken economy. (Really? So why are there so many angry un(der)employed college graduates right now?) I'm tired of all of this because it posits one sole purpose to education: creating compliant hard workers.

What about unlocking creativity? What about educating our citizens to make better choices than their forebearers did? What about creating empathy and an understanding of the strength in diversity embodied in our motto "e pluribus unum"? What about leaving the world a better place than we found it? (I firmly believe that this is golden rule #2: you leave anywhere you go nicer than you found it. Something to do with being a Girl Scout, I guess.)

Look, the reason our economy is in such a bad place is partly that we already live in a post-scarcity society. We don't actually need people to work that much in order to provide for everyone's basic needs. Accepting that won't bring massive profit, though, so we invent new needs and push a ridiculous tech cycle. That way no one is ever satisfied and people still have to work so hard that they don't get enough sleep or time with their families. We live in a world of overabundance, in which productivity continues to increase, and yet we seem to have to work more and more to keep treading water. How does this make sense?

I don't believe in the idea that hard work for work's sake is moral. Rather than worrying about how prepared our children are to do pointless work for the sake of beating another country, let's worry about how prepared they are to work together to make the world a better place.That's a purpose of public education that I can get behind.

How about you?

Scramble for Africa redux

Scramble for Africa Plan

1. Presort materials (map, squares, cut out goals) into packets. For a class of 30, you need 5 packets. 
2. Separate students into groups of 6 & give a leader the Scramble for Africa packet. 
3. Explain the rules: each student is a country trying to get territory in Africa according to a goal they will receive. Students will take territory by placing 1” squares of construction paper on the map. Each group goes clockwise around the circle, starting with Britain, taking turns placing the paper 1 piece at a time. Conflicts (papers overlapping) will be resolved through wars-- RPS. Loser’s square is put away and can’t be reused. Go until all nations have placed all squares.
4. Have them set up the desks in circles, pass out goals & papers. Students should not know each others’ goals—only their own. 
5. Wait to start all at the same time. Give 15 minutes for the activity itself. 
6. All wars should be conducted with your supervision. (I find that we have to go over a standard way to play RPS because students disagree.) 
7. Afterwards: Ask how many achieved their goals and have volunteers read each nation’s goal. Connect to the real scramble for Africa by comparing to a real map of Africa in 1914. Create a compare/contrast Venn diagram together. 
8. Return all materials & move desks back to normal – start notes on Africa 

Instructions as shown to students: 

1. Claim territory according to your goals. 
2. Starting with Great Britain and going clockwise, place 1 piece of paper on the map to claim territory until all countries have used up their paper. 
3. You may place over another country’s claim.
4. Once all countries have claimed territory, resolve any conflicts through wars. 

Rules for WAR 

1. Wars are conducted through Rock, Paper, Scissors. 
2. Best 2/3 rounds wins, and keeps the territory. 
3. Loser must remove their square and cannot place it back on the map. Your soldiers are dead. 

Goals

1. Portugal – secure African coastal areas to help develop secure trade routes with Asia 
2. England—secure a colonial empire (as much as you can) so we can build a transcontinental railroad that would extend from north to south. Keep port cities. 
3. France—secure a transcontinental empire (as much as you can) from west to east. We also want to gain control of old trading posts on the west coast. 
4. Germany—secure new colonies on the west coast and east coast for trading posts. We have no hold in Africa and really want one. 
5. Spain—secure African coastal areas to help develop secure trade routes with Asia. 
6. Italy—secure an African empire of any kind, we came into the imperialist race late and want to catch up. Closer to Italy is better. 

Note on proportions— 
My numbers and sizes are based on the students using an 8”x11” map of Africa. If you use a larger map (could be good) just adjust accordingly by making the squares larger, or upping each one by the same number of squares. The idea is that the amount of territory they can claim is related to how much was actually claimed by their nation.
Portugal – 3 squares
England—6 squares
France—5 squares
Germany—4 squares
Spain—2 squares
Italy—2 squares

Map— I use a blank map of Africa with a few major physical features (rivers mostly) and important port cities labeled. Definitely no political boundaries. Keep your map in a sheet protector!