The Supreme Ordeal

When I started teaching I started teaching at a difficult to staff school in Pilbara. It wasn't quite the middle of nowhere, but on a clear day you could see it. There were three staff members in the department.

I was given the barest minimum of programmes and by day 1 I was expected to teach it. Whilst help was available if I asked for it, it was pretty much me from then on in. I had to figure out the purpose of the topic, I had to teach myself the topic, I had to resource the topic, then go ahead and hope I didn't fail my kids too badly.

It was difficult, but it made me the teacher I am today. I like creating my own stuff; I like to be an expert in what I teach; I am not afraid to try something new knowing it may fail spectacularly.

 But I think the most affective result is that I now love programming and doing my own thing. And as I am borderline Sheldonesque, I have trouble thinking that anybody could possibly be different.



Anyway. I have just spent the last week typing up my vision of next year for my staff. It's all based on the Australian Curriculum and designed to give the teachers as much scope for their own styles and approaches as possible.

I'm going to attach the documents I sent out for years 7-9 teachers. I've also included what are the two options I see as generic grade descriptors.

Tech note: I saved them as PDFs then converted them to JPEGs. Only idea I had. Anything better?

Let me know what you think.

The Revelation

A review of the assessment in The Return, simply because there's something else I want to talk about, but it wouldn't be fair to proceed without addressing how that went, especially considering the deluge of response I received.

This task scared the Bieber out of the students. It forced them to go in front of other students without notes and improvise. And in some cases, they had to put up with (non-serious) abuse.

I learnt, or was reminded of, a couple of things:

1) Often, it's the quiet ones who shine in talks where they don't need to be themselves, and it's often the loudmouths who do the most poorly. (I have a slight bit of smug satisfaction when I see that.)

2) The biggest problem students (or at least the ones at my school) have with new tasks is not the fact that they're new to the students: it's the fact that students refuse to read the friggin instructions!

3) These teenagers have no idea about politics. They know about "The Ranga", "the old guy with the eyebrows", and that's about it. They have no idea about Question Time, Door Stops, Right Wing vs Left Wing, extreme vs moderate, what tax avoidance is, or why it's bad for a politician to be caught cheating on their spouse.

4) But they all know what a bunga bunga party is.

Overall, it worked. It was far less boring than a normal talk or a panel discussion.

The return

I really don’t see the value in informative speeches. A kid stands in front of a class with a poorly written essay which they’ve cut up into strips and recites in the most dull of terms whichever text they’re studying. The teacher, struggling to stay awake, has to decide what’s more important: the content or the speech. Sure it’s easy to say they’re both the same, but really? You get a really intelligent but painfully shy student deliver an awful speech with superb insights: what are you going to do?

So I always try to add a persuasive element to the task so the speech becomes foregrounded. And so recently, instead of assigning the students a speech about a speech, I went through Barack Obama’s victory acceptance speech over the course of three periods, then finished with the statement: “This is the greatest. Speech. Ever.” Then I challenged them to prove me wrong. So the students had to research a speech, and then construct a persuasive speech with an actual point to it.

Nothing too special, I know.

But

Then I actually looked at the programme (I don’t often do that, because.) And I realised there was another speech scheduled. This time it was meant to be a propaganda speech. Whilst normally I would do something like that (I have before) I wasn’t going to make them do another speech right after that, if for no other reason than 64 speeches in a row was going to suck.

So what was I going to do? We’re “studying” Animal Farm in class and I decided to play around with political obfuscation for a bit. 

  

1     I opened with making them read Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English language” Unfortunately we didn’t have more than day to concentrate on it, so we didn’t do much more than look at the important points. I also made them write the 6 rules for clearer writing on the front of their English files. 

2    We looked at some Youtube clips of that modern master of obfuscation, Tony Abbott. We looked at how he was able to talk so much without saying anything. The interview with Leigh Sales was particularly instructive. 

3     We came up with some rules for how to deal with questions you don’t want to answer.

a.       Never lie

b.       Never use the word ‘lie’.

c.       Never apologise for the fault you made. You can apologise for the damage you caused, or the way people feel, but never apologise for what you’ve been caught out doing.

d.       Open your answer with, “yes, and…” “well, you see…” or “that’s one way of looking at a very complex situation…” and then proceed to say whatever you want regardless of the question.

e.       Turn the question onto the interviewer. It buys time.

f.        Overload the answer with as many things as you want to talk about so the interview time is tied up with fewer questions.

g.       Say “As I said earlier,” with just a hint of frustration, and then give an answer regardless of whether or not you actually did say the answer earlier. it will make the interviewer look unprofessional.

h.       Have an expert opinion ready to use the moment you can.

i.         Have three catchphrases ready to pull out anytime the interview is getting away from you.

j.         Deflect criticism onto the opposition party.

4    4  Now they’re ready for the assignment.

The Assignment:

The students are to take on the role of a politician caught in a scandal. Their defence is to be given in one of 5 ways. Each part of the assessment is to be assigned “randomly”.

A student is a politician from a Left – Extreme; Left – Moderate; Right – Moderate; Right – Extreme party. Obviously some information is required to be provided; with Animal Farm being studied I took some time to look at Karl Marx’s philosophies, and how it was corrupted by communism; and then I looked at Adam Smith and Ayn Rand philosophies of capitalism and how it was corrupted by, well, capitalism.

There were 8 possible scandals in total. They were:

• Caught cheating on spouse                    
• Caught lying about insult about the PM.
• Cheated on tax for 5 years.                    
• Accepted $10,000 donation from a known criminal        
• Philosophical hypocrisy:

•           (Left) Supports a law that would increase the taxes on the unemployed and give benefits to corporations                                  

•           (Right) Employs 17 illegal immigrants under the minimum wage
• Lie:
•           (Left) Caught lying about a time they said that they thought climate change was a hoax         
•           (Right) Overheard calling a citizen a “fat cow”.       

All have some basis in reality and we had some discussion over real life scandals and how the politicians involved tried desperately (and often, hilariously) to get out of trouble.

The final option was I think, the awesome icing on the kick-arse cake. The students will have to defend themselves in one of the following 5 formats:

• Doorstop
• Press Conference
• Question Time
• TV interview
• Tv debate

Each has different rules which requires the remainder of the class to pay attention and prepare for other scandals just in case.

A doorstop is when the politician is ambushed by a pack of reporters on the way out of a building. The student will stand at the top of a staircase, and at least six other students will thrust their microphones in his face and ask questions. The student must respond to questions for 5 minutes,

A press conference is a little more civilised. The student gets to address the class for 2 minutes. After that they must field 5 questions from the class.

Question time will be more difficult. They have 5 minutes to explain themselves. However, during that time, the opposing party (half the class) will be heckling them. Their own party (the other half) will be heckling in return. The student must address at least three heckles.

TV interview is the most variable. Over the course of 5 minutes, the student must field questions about the scandal from an interviewer. The interviewer will be chosen at “random” (ie, by me) and it may actually be me.

TV debate is similar to the tv interview, except, there are two students involved; one from either side of the political spectrum. Both have their own scandals to deal with while trying to deflect attention away from themselves onto their opponent’s scandal. This involved most manipulation on my part as I had to ensure there was an even number of students, and an equal amount of lefties and right-wingers. I also need to make sure the ability of the opponents is similar.

Other considerations include: coaching the students to keep insults and interjections parliamentary safe. So no personal attacks that aren’t directly related to the scandal at hand, and no use of the word “liar”.

The part I’m most looking forward to is tomorrow when I tell them why the scandal descriptions are so vague:

Details are filled in on the spot. This is where the improvisation aspect occurs. If the person playing the main role doesn’t give the details, the other participants will. Who exactly is the known criminal? How much does the politician actually pay those immigrants? What is the marital status of the politician? What exactly did they call the PM? Who was the citizen called a fat cow?

More to follow

Test, Allies and Enemies (II)

Well it went well. It was actually the first time I’d presented day one of the conference so as a result it became the first conference I’d ever presented at where I’d not been at least slightly hungover or drunk from the night before, so I’d taken that as a bad omen.

However, a wicked revelation provided a good omen.

My first state conference presentation, I borrowed my mate’s watch to time. It was an analogue watch that didn’t have the numbers written on it, and as a result, I placed it on the podium upside down. It meant that I rushed the last half hour into 15 minutes, thinking I’d finished a quarter hour late, yet I’d finished a quarter hour early.

At my first national conference I relied on a mate to time me. At one stage I looked up and asked him how long I had. He held up three fingers. I had 12-odd slides to get through. I was sure I had time it better than that. So I rushed through, finished what I thought was 15 minutes late and then looked up to see a crowd of confused faces. My mate looked at me and said: “This finishes at 1 o’clock, right?” It didn't. It finished at 1:30.

He still owes me a beer for that.

At this, my first international conference, I arrived, checked in and was told by my colleague that I had been allotted a 90 minute slot. I’d prepared for 45 minutes.

Bugger.

Went well though. Lots of questions, lots of compliments. The only downside was that I’d forgotten to bring copies of Worlds Next Door. It was the book I wasn’t selling.

Let me explain. When I write a speech I need a hook – something that would let the piece flow. Apparently some people let their work speak for itself, however that’s for people with something to say. This speech after weeks of aching, it came to me. Since I was talking about Bugs, Buffy and Santa’s Giant Sack, I would plug the two books that I’d been published in: Buffy in the Classroom and Worlds Next Door, all the while claiming I wouldn’t plug them.

Not exactly The Parrot Sketch, I admit, but it was finally something.

And so, since Worlds Next Door was a small time press from WA, I thought I’d do them a favour a take over a dozen copies to sell. At the end of the speech 6 people asked me for copies, or which I had none – I’d left them in my damn hotel room. The next two and half days saw me lugging around a bag with them in, but no luck. No approaches. So sorry, Tehani.

Another slight problem was my inability to load up handouts to my wiki page. This conference was the first I’ve seen where they’ve truly embraced web2.0. All presenters were encouraged to maintain a wiki page, and then all attendees were given the opportunity to tweet their experiences. It wasn’t utilised as much as it could or should have been, but it was a great idea. Firefox couldn’t upload stuff, and Safari just wouldn’t. There was no way I was going to download Explorer to upload one thing. (Fight the Power! He says while typing away in MSWord on an Apple MacBook Pro while listening to music via the iPod on his iPhone.)

So I’ll try to upload them here.

And my next post will be about the conference itself.

The sphinx

Rejoice!

Apparently bureaucracy works! The Queensland College of teaching maintains high standards by occasioanlly firing people. Or at least that's what this article says.

Pffft.

WACOT had better not use this as 'evidence'.

The hydra

An article defending the use of cursive writing.

Even though it appears to have been discreditted, someone is trying to defend it. Their arguments appear to be:

• people won't be able to read old documents
• handwriting will be easy to forge
• that's pretty much it.

Legibility is apparently not a concern.

Tests, Allies and Enemies (I)

Yeah, it’s been hard.

I did predict that this would be an infrequently update blog mainly due to my Head of Year job, but bloody hell! I’m busier than a one-armed bee in Baghdad (See? Even my metaphors are becoming nonsensical.) I mean I did try. Every single day sheet of my diary had “update blog” on it.

In fact my to-do list had to be split into 3: high (urgency), mid (urgency), low (urgency) and long term. Unfortunately, “update blog” never made it past low urgency.

Especially since there was another entry that took prominence. “Write conference speech” started as long term, made its way to low, then mid, and then when I flipped over my Dexter Calendar to April and discovered just how little time I had to the conference, I skipped straight past high urgency, threw aside my diary and tried concentrating on that.

Still didn’t help.

I skipped the first rehearsal (in front of a regularly meeting group of friends who include two teachers, one minister and a professional comedian, since I wasn’t finished, but at least made it to my second rehearsal at school with five minutes to spare.

And I got it done. I’m looking to place my Keynote onto one of those websites which display PowerPoints, even though since I use these displays as punch-lines to jokes, it’ll be pretty nonsensical. Its clarity is further impeded by the challenge I’ve been set to place a zombie slide and Michael Ironside’s utterance of “It sucked his brains out!” from Starship Troopers into every presentation I do. (I was quite proud of my science teachers’ presentation.)

I’ll let you know how the conference and the speech went.

A Brief Side-Sojourn (If that's grammatically correct)

My proposal to the state conference committee:

A Geek’s Guide to teaching Lit

Never before permitted

To interact with the glory-icon that is Lit,

The Geek of renown faces the daunting task

Of bringing down the epic-course to his level.

How will someone steeped in culture that is Pop

Face the Grendel of the canon?

Will the journey of this devotee of enchanted pictures

End in sorrow or triumph?

(And exactly how the hell did he justify teaching Buffy in a Lit course?)

A little much you think?

Supernatural Aid

One problem faced at a school with a budget tighter than a fish’s arsehole is the supply of texts.

Two choices then face a teacher of Lit: use the ones already in stock, or find them elsewhere.

As far as I’m concerned the former choice isn’t really a choice at all. To define your concept by the texts available is doing everything arse-backwards. It’s like making a movie by getting stars and then writing the script based on the acting abilities. And that doesn’t work. Ocean’s 11 proves that.

But the second way works much better. Literature involves stories written by “dead white males” as the critics of “the” canon almost invariably put it. But there is one huge advantage with that.

They’re all out of copyright.

All the texts I’ve chosen to study are available freely on the internet. www.gutenberg.org contains nearly all of the texts I wanted. I did this a couple of years ago when I had a sudden urge to jettison the texts out of a Year 12 course and decide to instead teach Heart of Darkness. (Heart of Darkness, by the way, was the only novel I actually read in two years of studying Literature when I was in high school.) I took the copy from Gutenberg, printed it off, wrote notes all over the copies, and photocopied 60 copies. All up, I think it cost the school $25. Plus the students now had copies of their own which they could write all over.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered other problems. Gutenberg doesn’t have Medea which struck me as odd. So I had to google blindly. (Side note: I just noticed Word doesn’t recognise lower-cased “google” as a verb. It has the red squiggly line of stupid under it.) The first copy that I read was in prose.

The second copy that I read was translated as poetry. I’d printed off my copy and was about to copy it for the class when my librarian-teacher (or teacher-librarian. I should get that right. Not only is she my friend, and awesome at her job(s), she has that stereotypical nasty school librarian streak to her. So hot. So very hot.) pointed out another copy that was annotated. It was shorter (86 pages vs 39), thus fewer pages, thus cheaper, thus happier school. (Remind me to tell you about our school’s attempt to guilt us into making fewer photocopies.)

But there was another very interesting difference between the three texts. The first – the prose - copy I was going to use had what I call the “Thor effect.” Obviously the translator was going for a more “noble” feel to it. After all, this was ancient Greek Literature and so therefore should be ‘above’ normal writing. Thus “thee”, “thy”, and “wouldst thou” proliferated. It was essentially written in early modern English, though the translation was done in the early 20^th Century.

It seemed contradictory for two reasons: why change it from poetry to prose, but still elevate the language; and why if Euripides was renowned for using mundane, ordinary language for extraordinary purposes, would a translator ignore this, and once again, elevate it beyond an average reader’s understanding?

And here I am confronted with the problem of using Medea, Beowulf and to a lesser extent, The Canterbury Tales: which translations do I use?

It’s obvious now that I can’t concentrate – honestly – on the language used, since it’s not the original language. But I can’t ignore it. And surely the translations will differ considerably.

Any thoughts?

Crossing the Threshold

I thought an explanation/discussion of a couple of assignments may be pertinent:
(am I speaking like a Lit teacher yet?)

Most of the assessments are based around essays, as the curriculum documents insist on; they’re either extended out-of-class essays or in class essays, so nothing too spectacular there.

The three that aren’t are the ones I want to look at a little closer.

At least one task must be an oral task. However, I don’t really like speeches which are about a subject. For instance, all the time you’re watching presentations, are you truly listening to content? And really, where’s the skill in that? I like speeches which have a point to them, where the rhetorical skills of the student has some kind of purpose. And far too often, an oral task throws out the student’s overall marks, especially when you have to take into account the examination has no oral component.

So I’ve tried to be a little creative with the oral task. Their task needs to be about Frankenstein and needs to be a little bit of a performance piece where they create a PowerPoint with images that symbolise the ideas of Romanticism and Frankenstein. As a study guide, I’m going to try to give them copies of the brilliant graphic novel (and it’s a graphic novel, not a comic or trade paperback) called Frankenstein’s Womb. It’s a mystical bio of Mary Shelley’s visit to a castle that inspired her novel. It’s a great examination of the novel’s themes and position between Romanticism and Modernism. Warren Ellis, one of the great comic writers from England wrote it. Absolutely awesome.

A new element of the course is the creative component. I think it’s a good idea. Try to get the students to explore the idea of literature from the other side. What I’ve decided to do is to try to combine it with revision and have two assignments at the end of the year.

The first task is to take a scene from one of the texts and change its genre. Here I mean “genre” as in “form", as defined by the syllabus. So they take a poem, for example, and rewrite it as a play. This will help their knowledge of a specific text and then two text types. I’m wondering if I should assign them random texts and text types so they may get out of their comfort zones.

The next task I pretty much stole from a dozen different sources. They have to rewrite a scene from a marginalised character’s perspective. Basically their version of The Wide Saragossa Sea. I reckon this’d help their knowledge of a text, characterisation and multiple readings.

Waddaya reckon?