Middle level education

My final thoughts about what middle level education should be was pretty much reinforced through our class. Students should spend the first four to six years (K-5?) learning and strengthening their basic skills (particularly math, but we know my position on that). Then, in middle school, they should start the process of transferring from learning the basic skills to applying them over the span of the first couple years, maybe 6th and 7th grades, before gearing the 8th grade year for almost entirely project-based work unless there is new material that needs to be taught prior to project work. Granted, there is always new material, but by the 8th grade, students should be able to readily implement the new material into applicability, if necessary. After 8th grade, working in groups and applying basic skills to solve problems and create projects should be second nature and give the students a head start moving into the high school years. In high school, they will be doing a lot of projects in all subject areas, and middle school should be the training ground for this.

including parents

You know, I'm also a Generation X person myself. In fact, I was born almost dead center of the Generation X years, so I know what it was like to be a latchkey kid. My grandparents had to do the shopping for the family (my brother and I were raised by our grandparents, so they weren't even baby boomers, but the generation before that), and sometimes would not be home when we got off the school bus. However, we didn't see this as a detriment to our upbringing; in fact, they trusted us to get our own lunch and go off to our friends' houses if that's what we chose to do, as long as we left a note stating as much. I never felt neglected or anything like that, so communicating with parents who may have had these feelings may have their hands full dealing with me.
In the "Solve for X" section, I have some agreements and disagreements. Planning for extracurricular activities requires parental involvement and I will strongly encourage and even actively search out that involvement. Parents completing homework assignments with their students? I thought that's what you were supposed to do anyway. Again, this is strongly encouraged, but the free-choice assignment may be restricted to every two weeks so I can be assured that the required in-class content is covered appropriately. My one disagreement is having a parent come in to teach for an afternoon. That is the equivalent of me as a teacher going in to a parent's place of employment and giving my input as to how their business should be run. I'm sorry, but this particular idea isn't good. My job as a teacher depends on the information that the students accumulate from my efforts; the parent's place to teach is at home, with the exception of the chaperoning on field trips. I fully expect them to be teachers as well as chaperones in this arena.....just not in the classroom. This is my office and has to be my rules. I do expect input from the parents and I expect help from them. This is part of what makes my job a little easier and I always weigh the input of others equally, but must work for the good of the whole as well as the good of the individual.

Problem-based learning

I'm not active in a classroom yet, but I still have some input to share about problem-based learning. I am a HUGE proponent of problem-based learning as opposed to simple bookwork and lecture learning. Kids want to be actively engaged in their learning; the sooner today's teachers realize this, the sooner we may see improvements in assessment scores. My number one goal as a middle school teacher is to answer the age-old question asked by middle-school students everywhere: "When am I ever going to use this?" I think some lecture is necessary to teach new material, but the faster you move into applying subject material into real-life situations, the faster the students will learn the importance of each topic as it is really applied outside the classroom. My idea is to take each topic as it arises, give one class lecture (two at most) with a book assignment to make sure the students understand the material, and have problems or small projects prepared for each topic for the students to work on in small groups. This could be varied to make a little bigger problem or project for each chapter as it ties everything in the given chapter together. I suppose either way could work, depending on the situation; I just think the kids will perform better on assessments and in class if they understand how to use the concepts that they learn in class rather than just answering the questions posed by homework assignments.

cyber communication

OK, I think I prefer blogging to voice thread. I don't want to feel like I have to rehearse what I want to say before I say it and go back and cancel and save again. If I don't like what I'm saying in my blog, I can delete as I go before I make an official post.
Anyway, I read the Keteyian article on cyber communication and, well, while I can understand finding a way to communicate with kids by using methods that they are comfortable with, I think there is a risk of creating forms of antisocial behavior by encouraging instant messaging when you are within the same building. My wife and I do it once in a while just to be foolish, knowing the other is in the very next room, or with one of the kids who may be online on their own computer upstairs. 99.99 percent of our communication in the house is face-to-face, or at least through the use of our voices. If the parent and child find it more comfortable to IM each other, fine; I just don't see the need to encourage it. Sometimes we have to learn to leave our comfort zone (which I did by posting my voice thread....not comfortable, but I did it).
As far as the overuse of technology, I have to concur with Keteyian that it (use of technology) is becoming more prevalent with today's youth. Between cell phones, Internet communications, television and other various media, and online gaming, kids today are spending way too much time in front of the tube and not enough time getting physical activity (like I'm one to talk here). Hey, I work 65 hours a week, and it's all physical, so I've earned my right to a little tube time. 7.5 hours a day with electronic devices is almost half of kids' waking hours-------->obesity in America. It does kind of add up, if you look at it long enough, but by doing that, you're not getting any exercise. I'll save the obesity speech for another time, though. It's just the concept of what technology and its roles in communication have become over the last 20 years. Is it a problem? That depends on how you want to define what should and shouldn't happen in communication.

morning news

This is something that, as a participant, we tried back in 1983 as a class. It was a one-time thing that we did with the given technology of the day. We wanted to get an idea of what newscasters and anchorpeople did on the air as part of our current events studies, so we did a news program with local news, sports, and weather. We added our own little twist to it so it looked a bit more like Saturday Night Live than a real news broadcast, where the "audience" would throw paper and other harmless stuff at the news or sports anchor while they were trying to read their script, just to have some fun with it, and that we did. It was a learning experience that we managed to turn into fun.
Today's technology would make it so much better. Classes can actually utilize YouTube to put their "news" on the Internet and view later on, even a year or two after the fact, like an archive of sorts. I believe it would be exciting for the kids in high school to go on YouTube and view themselves as sixth-graders doing a news broadcast and looking at the posted replies. It is also a way for kids in other states and countries to view the same thing and see what you do in your school. That's just my viewpoint, anyway.

project learning

This is what it is all about. By the seventh or eighth grade year, students should be actively engaged in this form of learning. You might ask why. I believe that students will get more out of their education by seeing and experiencing first-hand how subject material comes to life and is used. One thing that really comes out of project learning is the life experience that comes along with the learning. Another important benefit is that, through the experience of projects, the students can "fail" without actually failing. That may sound a bit funny, but we can't expect that all projects that are undertaken by the students will be successful. However, if the students do everything that they are supposed to do and perform well, the "failures" that they may experience won't be crucial. In fact, it would do the students well to occasionally "fail" a project. Now I'm using quotes around the word fail because they are still learning. It's not like they are designing the new engine for the space shuttle and if they mess that up, okay, that would be a critical failure and lives would be lost. By experiencing their mistakes through project learning and actually learning from these mistakes, those mistakes won't be made when it actually counts in real life. Project learning is like a simulation machine for life; if you screw up, it's okay---no one gets hurt but you see where you made your errors so you don't make that error next time. Life is not a multiple-choice test, though sometimes it seems like it when we're faced with options and more than one answer seems likely. I'm pretty sure I would get a failing grade if that were the case. Let me get back to the word "fail" again for a moment. I don't want to come across as believing that the students will fail. I want to come across as being the one to say, "Okay, so this didn't go as planned; let's back up and see what went wrong and correct it." By doing this, the students get to deal with temporary failure, but eventual success. After all, isn't this what we want the students to do?

a bright idea

This sounds like a facetious title, but actually it's not. Gathering just from the news story, Vine Street School here in Bangor conducted a project recently that integrated math, social studies, and phys ed. What the students did were, in groups, chose (or were assigned, not sure) countries which they were to study, the history and culture and the like. This was the social studies portion. Then, they "represented" these countries in their own Olympics that ran concurrently with the Winter Olympics recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia. This integrated the math and phys ed portions. Whoever dreamed up this idea is an educational genius. The kids got actively engaged in the study of their prospective countries and had fun competing in their "Olympics", which allowed them to perform some physical activity and get much needed exercise, especially during the months where kids generally don't get that exercise. You think we can come up with some similar ideas for integrating subject areas and genuinely show how what we study in school is applicable in the outside world? This is how we should be teaching our students, not putting a bubble sheet in front of them and making them take multiple-guess assessments and using that to measure their performance. They won't be taking these exams when they're in the real world solving real-world problems.