As I was telling Stacey, this has been the most challenging start to a school year that I have ever had. Not that this is an excuse, but this is why my attention has not been focused on my research. I have entirely neglected my blog. It did not help that Blogger is again blocked at school. This said, I have been able to keep up with some of the items I outlined on my timeline.
The middle of last week we started reading and discussing A Gathering of Old Men in my class. We held our first Socratic Seminar and I feel good that the foundation for solid discussions of literature are beginning to be established in the course.
That is the good news…the bad news is that I have dropped the ball in all sorts of other ways. For instance, I realized this week that I have not yet submitted the request to conduct research to the district (Sorry, Cindy!) According to my timeline I needed to order new titles for book clubs in August…it is September and I have not selected any new titles let alone ordered books. I also planned to pass out a generic permission slip to parents in August; the book club specific permission slip will be the only one parents will receive.
That is what I haven’t done…here’s what I need to do: I need to select the works I am going to use in my short-story-author-study-pre-book-club unit. This is the idea that Cindy generated to help students see what it is like to be in a book club before they are in a book club and hopefully teach them the “norms” before they are in a book club drawing dragons. ☺
I need to get that form to the district and reconcile myself to the fact that I may not be able to record student conversations this semester which I am sure is not ideal for Cindy’s research, but that I may be able to record the conversations of the other half of my students second semester.
I need to select the titles that we will add to the options we offer to the students. Any ideas or suggestions? Cindy and I came up with a list this summer and I simply need to carve out some time to devote to that endeavor next week.
I need to recover some of the focus and enthusiasm I had this summer. The beginning of this school year has had me fantacizing about working at Starbucks (that might be sacreligious to type in a Mugs ☺ ), so my hope is that by reconnecting with my research I can also reconnect with some of my enthusiasm for teaching.
From my inquiry group, I need forgiveness for being the worst blogging buddy ever. I also need some feedback and ideas about what would be helpful to other teachers in a demo about book clubs. Would you want the nuts and bolts how to organize it? Would you want specific anecdotes on some of the challenges and rewards of book clubs? What should I focus my demo on in order for it to be useful to the majority of my audience in February?
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2 comments:
Whew--what a relief it is to read this, Rebecca! I was SOOOO worried that you'd be tapping your foot and rolling your eyes and looking at your watch because we hadn't gotten together yet. Turns out we're just about in the same spot, so let's just start where we are.
It will be just fine to do another round of what we've been doing and hope for conversation recording in the spring. Also, I can help with choosing short stories, writing proposals, etc. I've got this sabbatical gig, remember?
(And if that doesn't work out, maybe Steph can hook us up with that Starbucks job.)
Rebecca, whew, long list but it shows you've really been thinking about it. As far as the question on what people would want, if it were me thinking about doing a book club I'd DEFINATELY want the nuts and bolts. The guts of the project in my mind would be: list of good books with a short synopsis (so I didn't have to take time to do this part); an easy and fail-safe method for grading (yeah, like that even exists!); and tools for management. I think you're already well on the way!
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