Period 4: Revolution! Day 3 - Class Recap

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 made. 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. 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 2/26/13:

News Brief
Present Togetherness Posters

Feedback Review

Forced Choice

Homework: Read the blog! The next news brief is assigned to Ashley.

News Brief: After checking in about the weekend and discussing the Oscars for a bit ("Argo" won for Best Picture - a movie having to do with the Iranian Revolution), Adam brought in this news article to talk about: CNN.com - Park Geun-hye becomes South Korea's first female president. So interesting! I talked about how women in leadership positions of government are becoming more common. Rwanda is a good example: they are required by law to have at least 30% women in government - parliament has over 50% now. I also mentioned that Dennis Rodman and some of the Harlem Globetrotters are visiting North Korea to try and use basketball to bring people together (like the posters you presented)! Thanks for the great article, Adam!

Present Togetherness Posters: I wanted to make sure that everyone had the chance to see the great work and art you made last week, so I made time for students to present your posters to everyone. Thank you for all of the great ideas! I will be putting them up on the walls in the class, to remind us that there is more to the world than war and conflict.

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:

Google Drive: Period 4 Feedback Review PowerPoint

My general impressions were that the class enjoys the news briefs, discussions, and history in class 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 few 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 them 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.

Have a great rest of the day. See you on Thursday!