8A Podcasts Rocket And Sparky!

Republished from Livejournal

• Yesterday morning, 8A completed podcasts. They weren't brilliant, but they worked. Thing is, I never have more than fifteen anyway, because the rest are in ESL class. Yesterday, four were absent, two were on yard duty, one was on in-house suspension, two had to be sent off to sub school for sheer rudeness(but only till they had finished reading and rehearsing the play), one had to accompany them there. At one point, I looked around the library and saw SIX KIDS! But the two badly behaved boys returned and got some recording done. One of them was actually quite a good Eddie, the hero/heroine of Rocket And Sparky, a play based on Edwina Harvey's short story of the same name... Except his group ruined their otherwise not-bad podcast by inserting swear words. I don't know why they did it except it seemed a good idea at the time, because as soon as they had finished, they admitted to me that they had added swear words and I probably wouldn't like it. 
•  I listened and they were right, I didn't like it. I didn't yell. I simply looked reproachfully at the ringleader and told him how an otherwise good podcast had been ruined and what a shame, because I had written the role of Eddie especially for him(well, I did hear his voice in my head while I wrote, anyway - "Eddie" was originally a girl, but I have a mostly male class)He looked shamed, deleted the podcast and called out, "Okay, everyone, let's have another crack at it." There wasn't time, unfortunately. I may have to find a lunchtime when they can do this.
  
  Two other boys did a good job, except they had to take on all the roles and one of them in particular sounded the same whatever part he played. At one point, the other boy was reading a dialogue between two characters without changing either voice. But he had the nous to begin with an introduction explaining who was playing what.
  
  The three girls did quite a good job and when I showed them a YouTube video of a camel bleating they kept it to play on a second iPad when Rocket was on. How clever! The others just read the script.
  
  So it worked, sort of. I got even the difficult kids to record - I suspect the swearing was a last-minute idea. That group actually came up with a silly but amusing bit of music with a camel theme to play at the beginning - Rocket is a camel and the setting is a desert. Their podcast would have been the best of the three if it weren't for the swearing. They used the script, they just stuck in extra - and I think they were already sorry when they told me.
  This was in response to being ordered to "teach a play". And finding nothing of interest in our few battered class sets. And writing my own, using a friend's story.
  
  Who would have thought, when I started teaching, that you could do this sort of thing? High technology was showing slides. Maybe we could have recorded a play but there would have been one old, battered school tape recorder.
  
  Amazing!
  
  Oh, and Edwina Harvey wants us to see if we can sell the playlet to the NSW School Magazine. I'm pursuing it. If it could entertain a difficult Year 8, why not a Grade 6?

Further Adventures In Year 8

Remember that student who got working when I gave him something he thought he could do? Two weeks and I haven't had to yell at him. Yet. Fingers crossed. It's an ongoing thing.

Last week, I started with the play thing. We were told that according to a document called "Scope and sequence" we had to teach a play. What play? Any play. But all we had were those dreadful, shabby class sets - and the only one I could remotely live with was lent to another campus for the term. And I wasn't even sure what we were supposed to DO with the play. Teach it as a text? Just read it? Make them do their own? None of these were possible with the supplies we had and my students, some of whom are simply too shy to read aloud and others who won't take it seriously.

I wrote my own. And got the kids to read it with the original short story on which it was based. Who has time to do something original? And then I got them to practise it and play with Garage Band, so they can do it as a podcast. I hope I can get them going on Monday to actually DO the podcast. They really seemed to enjoy it.

Fingers crossed!

Experiments In History Classes

I have a number of students who just can't cope with Year 8 work but aren't listed as integration students or funded as such. Even where they are, we have a limited number of aides to help. I wish I knew why we're receiving funding for more students and there are fewer aides, but there you are.  I have to make the best of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I do sometimes corner one or another of our aides, who are all kind people who know their jobs very well, and ask for an opinion of a piece of work I've prepared for a particular student.

In this case, the student was a very difficult young man who has a way of running around the classroom doing nothing except socialise and claim that he "helped" another student who has done a decent job of his own assignment. Occasionally he has found a picture, but that was it.

Something had to be done. I prepared a simplified version of one topic, breaking it down into instructions, but even that was too hard for him and the running around the classroom continued.

Last week, desperate, I did it again, even simpler. The topic was The Black Death. I supplied the   questions, eg "Another name for the Black Death was..." There were about six questions. I told him that I'd like him to answer the questions, looking them up on line, then use the answers to produce a poster or PowerPoint with illustrations he could also find online. I had showed them to an  aide, who said that yes, it was a good simple piece that he should be able to do.

Breakthrough! He set up his table among the shelves in the library, where we were, to prevent his friends  from distracting him - I kept shooing them away for him, telling them he was there because he wanted to be -  and got to work. I did have to help him with a couple of the questions, but he was more than willing. Well before the session was over, he'd managed to produce about three quarters of  a decent PowerPoint! I suggested a couple of illustrations to go with it. He completed it next lesson.

You see, everyone wants to succeed. He's naughty because it distracts his teachers from noticing that he just can't do the work. Given a chance to succeed, he did.

And it could never have been done in the tiny classroom that class calls homeroom. The library is big enough that he could  hide from those who would stop him from succeeding. That's something else I've learned. 

I don't know if I can do it again - this is trial and error, mostly error - but I do know that I was
blissfully happy afterwards.

Year 8 Strikes Again!

What a weird week it's been so far!

Year 8A on Monday and this afternoon... It's so hard to know what to do. The two students who plagiarised did their hand written replacements without argument, though nether of them got past one paragraph on Monday. Today I sighed and told them they could start typing. Their story starts were fairly acceptable and today the girl, at least, got well past that, but I need to read it before deciding what she can do - it was the end of the day and I had to go to a staff meeting.

One student who is perfectly capable of doing more had to be made to handwrite his first draft on Monday and came up with something acceptable. I told him, too, he could type it today, but he showed me instead a new story he was typing! That, too, was acceptable if he finishes it, though I suggested e change the hero's name because he was using his own and it was not meant to be autobiographical. Whether he will complete it I don't know. What can you do with students who won't do anything outside of class time? Not everyone has a home computer, but there's always the library at lunchtime and I open three times a week. I may have to order some of these students to come in and use the computer room to finish at lunchtime. It worked last year.

I have an integration student who has done about all I'm going to get out of him - he has no classroom support and I can't persuade him to try another piece - so today I gave him a BBC vocabulary game to play while the others got on with it. I will have to come up with something else for our next activity.

There are the ones who have written thousands of words, but need to focus now on their grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  How do you do this without having to mark every last missing comma and change of tense for them? And what do you do when, bless them, they want to write even more wen they haven't tidied up the six thousand word epic they've already done? My top student, the one who used The Hero's Journey to write a rather touching story about a boy searching for his mother, has now handed me another epic about a boy tangled up with the Taliban! I haven't read that yet, but did suggest she do a little research on the Taliban to make sure she was getting it right. Perhaps too much to ask of a Year 8 child? At her age I was writing dreadful historical novels I hadn't researched either.

And then there was the young lady who handed me some fan fiction... Well, she had written it herself, so I just suggested she make sure that readers like me, unfamiliar with the universe, could follow it.

And the boy with the gory story who decided not to kill off his hero after all and is up to chapter 3 of what's turning into a novel!

I don't know. I'm thrilled with the response from the keen students, but how much have I been able to teach them and the others? You spend so much time on discipline you can find yourself unable to sit down   with the students individually. It can be exhausting.

Tomorrow I am going to be with my history class as some do their presentations. Then we'll look at the iMovie trailers they did on Tuesday. More of that later.

Year 8 fiction - The Sequel! (From My Great Raven Blog

Well, the holidays are over and I've just finished reading the last of my student stories. They have ranged from a hundred-odd words to what has to be at least six thousand! Twelve pages of small print? Has to be.

Two of  them were plagiarised, word for word, beginning to end, from online sources and what I'm going to tell the students I have no idea. Clearly they couldn't handle the story starters I gave them last term and were desperate enough to pinch something. I'd love to just say, "Look, I don't CARE if your writing is bad! It's my job to help you fix it and I can't do that if I don't know how you write in the first place." If I thought it would do any good I'd say that. But I don't think it will. All I can do is offer them the chance to do it again, with a different writing prompt, by hand, in a single session.

There was a very short piece from a student who asked me for help for the first time this year. It sn't much, but it was what he could do. He did his best. I will give him some more short pieces to do. Perhaps start with a Cloze activity in which he chooses his own words to fill the gaps?

There was a story that used one of the prompts to have one gory murder after another, but the student really, really enjoyed the writing. He ended it abruptly with "and then he came back and killed my uncle and me. The End." but I think he just felt he had to finish. I went cross-eyed trying to edit all the punctuation-free sentences and the switching between tenses - finally I gave up and put in notes to ask him to make up his mind which tense he wanted and stick with it.

A lot were unfinished. I will get them to do a story outline before continuing.

I really must mention the two who used "The Hero's Journey." One was unfinished, but long, an account of a girl who is approached by a long-lost brother under mysterious circumstances, and broke off just as the siblings were about to escape from a murderous millionaire older sister... I have told her it's an exciting story and I'm keen to see how it ends. She used the basic elements - the call to adventure, the journey...

The six thousand word story was less obvious as Hero's Journey, but it also used the elements. The call to adventure was a young boy from a village deciding to go to the city in search of his mother, who was taken away for medical treatment by a doctor whose name he knew, but not much else, some time ago, also fulfilling a mission for a neighbour whose children have vanished into the city, and returning to his reward. It was written with a Vietnamese accent, as the young lady has only recently decided to join mainstream English classes, so it needs work yet, incuding some tightening, but she is proud of it, and so she should be.

I think the Hero's Journey is not a bad place to start students off and will consider using it again, but it's a work in progress, always needing adapting.

People keep telling me that because I'm a writer I should therefore be able to teach writing. I really don't think it's that simple.  There are a lot of people out there teaching creative writing without ever having sold anything. Then they sell a first novel and write in their bio notes that they teach it and I say, "Hang on, this is a first novel, not even a good one, and she's TEACHING this? How did she get the job?"

In my case, I know how I write, but that doesn't mean everyone does it the same way. For example,
I just start writing and worry about the quality later. But kids can't always do that, or they don't understand the concept of "first draft." I can't even show them my own work in drafts, because even my first draft is better than their finished products in most cases. I am never going to write a long, run-on sentence with no punctuation or change tenses and even person.

Guess I'll have to write something awful and let them crit it.

Beginning Narrative With Year 8

I'm a writer. I know how to write, but teaching Year 8 how to write stories? If it was that easy, everyone would be selling.

Yet it must be done. Next year they will have to do their NAPLAN test, designed by a former government to gain votes by making those lazy, good for nothing teachers accountable! And when they sit down to do their Year 9 NAPLAN test they will have to write either a persuasive essay or a "narrative"(that's a story to you and me) - not a choice but one or the other, you aren't told which. And the narrative may well be a prompt such as "The Box". And they will have 40-50 minutes to write it - heck, I'm still working on a story submission for "Cranky Ladies Of History" after months! And I'm a professional.

I did three things on Monday. One was to gather some copies of the school anthology, stories written by students and put together and edited by Chris Wheat, a wonderful teacher and YA novelist who works at my school as the English and literacy co-ordinator. Another was to print out my much simplified version of The Hero's Journey, which I did as a workshop at last year's Continuum convention, with Paul Collins. It makes a good adventure story outline. The third was to put together some links to appropriate movie trailers on YouTube

It was not a good start to the day. The interactive whiteboard room computer didn't work - someone had unplugged the important bits and I had no idea which they were or what to do. Luckily, the other Year 8 teacher had cancelled her booking for the computer room. So I took them there and gathered them around a computer. One of the students logged in and went to YouTube  for me. First, though, I told them the general story, about this ordinary guy who is visited one day by someone who tells him he's special and must go on a quest. Along the away, he makes friends and deals with a major enemy and comes back with a reward for all that trouble. I invited them to think of some stories that fitted that description. They did very well - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Up, even a couple I hadn't thought of, such as Percy Jackson and Doctor Who!

We watched several trailers, both the ones I'd prepared and some the students had thought of. We discussed how they fitted the story outline I'd given them.

It was going very well, until I started trying to do a story together on the board. That has worked with other  classes and should have worked this time, but I suppose I was lucky that some of the worse behaved  students had lasted even that long.

I told them we were returning to our classroom, where they would do the rest by hand. My original plan was that after the story on the board they could get into groups to brainstorm, but it was not to be. They went ahead of me and I arrived to find that one of the more difficult students was being told off by a teacher whose classroom window he had broken by butting it with his head.

He was sent with a note and a reliable student to sub school while I tried to unlock my classroom. The door wouldn't open. Some students told me that this had happened when they were last there with another teacher, who had taken them to another room.

I had to find another room for them. We found one, where we read some stories from the anthology together, then individually, about all there was time to do by now. The vice principal brought back the boy who had broken the window and asked for information. Not being suicidal, the students kept silent, so he told them that they'd all do a week's lunchtime detention unless someone came to him and discussed the matter(that worked, by the way).

After all this disaster, you'd think the lesson would be a compete flop. It wasn't.

Even the difficult boys found at least one story that appealed, once I let them choose their own. One of them, mind you, was delighted to find a story with swearing in it - written, mind you, by a good student who was using it in context. One of the girls found a story that touched her and exclaimed, "Oh, how sad! Miss, do read this one."

And two other girls were so keen to write a story based on The Hero's Journey, they started immediately and took their English books home to get on with it. One is a student who, though she is lovely and works hard, has never been able to write a lot. She showed me, today, two pages of dense text about a Percy Jackson-style demigoddess who discovers she is the daughter of a fire god. On Thurday, while the others do the brainstorm, I'm going to let those two get on with their stories.

If I can get into the classroom.

Reflective Journal: Yet ANOTHER Challenge!

I met the challenge of teaching Pathways, the homeroom subject, with a wonderful practical community project that appealed to even the most difficult students, who showed what they could do and had every reason to be proud of themselves at the end of the year. Last year, our Year 8 students raised $900 between them for Save The Children!

And after the feel-good ceremony we were all called into the staff room to receive our allotments for this year and I had been taken off Pathways for the convenience of the timetable and given history/ geography, a subject I'm not qualified to teach -again for the benefit of the timetable.

No more Community Project! My colleague Jasna was also taken off it and while both teachers assigned to the subject have been supportive, I doubt either of them is interested in doing this. So we'll be back to presenting one student with the Pathways award and the subject being entirely classroom-and-theory-based and no one being able to add it to the resume they have to do in Year 9 and 10. Sigh! You know, I had one extremely difficult student last year who proved to have some leadership skills and some good ideas and rated this as his favourite subject.

But I made the best of the H/G. A colleague arranged for me to see a very good junior history teacher at her old campus to get some ideas and materials. The whole thing lasted about half an hour, after which I thanked her politely, took the stuff she had given me and took public transport back to my own campus. I got hold of the then Scope and Sequence -the document that tells you what you have to get through(though not  how - it assumes you know that)-and spent a chunk of my summer  break trying to come up with something to start with.

I prepared something I thought might be a good start, according to the document I had, and might even be engaging. And as soon as we returned, we were handed a revised scope and sequence document and there has been another since then.

Still. I have done what I can. I took them through a bit of research skill, using the topic they're about to cover, so they would have something to start, plus showing them some primary documents(another thing we have to do), such as Ibn Fadlan's description of Vikings as filthy and John of Wallingford's description of them as disgustingly clean.

  I found I also had to do mapping - what do I know about maps and mapping? I asked the campus vice- principal, who himself has to do H/G. He said, "What do I know?" and told me he had had his year 7 label and colour a world map.

I decided to do the same, except I stuck to a map of the Viking world, after a map of Scandinavia, as we're about to do the Vikings. And that told me something about the class's skills - or lack, thereof - in looking things up. I had intended to spend some time working on it with them, but when I was absent on the day I was to start, someone found my photocopied maps and handed them out to start, without discussion. So they began without me there.

Some did very well and will have their maps up immediately on the classroom wall. They got what they had to do and how to look up the countries they needed to label. Others didn't. They started the colouring in before they had done the labelling. So two or three coloured in the Mediterranean green and North Africa blue! Two put the Mediterranean in the Atlantic and one labelled the coast of North America as Algeria! I photocopied them all so I could return the originals with comments, but one student - the one who labelled Algeria in North America - refused to fix it, despite only a couple of small things needing changing. I'll keep the photocopy to show his parents if necessary, when they come for PT night, and cover the mistakes in the original with a white label, to make it easier. If he still refuses, well, all I can do is keep the mixed up one to show his Mum and Dad. His sister was in my class last year and they came for her. One boy didn't exactly do what I had asked, but worked so hard on his map that I'm putting it up anyway; he is apparently a difficult student and I want to reward his effort. He got the labels right, anyway, just didn't do it as I had asked.

Anyway, last Friday, I did an exercise using Melway's Street Directory, to give them  practice in looking up; it works pretty much the same as an atlas and is clearer. I discussed it for a while, then handed them a sheet of places in their area to look up. All they had to do was look up the map numbers in the index and write it down, then mark the spots on the photocopy I'd given them. That seemed to work better than the previous mapping we'd done, in giving them an idea how to look up. The only problem is that Melway's and atlases alike go out of date. The area didn't, of course, but the edition 35 I had at home, where I prepared it, had facilities the school's edition 32 didn't, so I had to change that bit.

The atlases are another matter. The class set is so old, it still has the Soviet Union in it! The individual copies are battered and some have had pages torn out. I am going to see if a proposal for a new class set, even ten copies to start with, will get some support.

My library is gradually starting up. I am hoping to arrange manuscript reading again this year, possibly in March, according to the publicist at Allen and Unwin. The kids love doing it and I have a new member or two in the younger classes, which is good, because I'm not sure all the Year 10s from last year are interested - some of them are doing VCE Psychology, though this didn't stop my first lot. On the other hand,some kids who had drifted away are back . I have mentioned to the English co-ordinator that I'd love to do Premier's Reading Challenge, but it's a lot of work and can't be done without staff support. I've found a new children's bookshop to do displays, since the Little Bookroom emailed to say they're not doing this any more and tried to make it sound like good news! (You can now buy online - yay! Actually, we can't. I tried to explain this and that I do this for the students, who help choose new books, to no avail. Also, that I'd been a loyal customer fr many years. No use. The only visits they will make are if you're Veryrich Grammar running a book fair). Fortunately, the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville is happy to come instead, and there's always Dymock's for the specific books.

I'm discovering the students' reading levels to help them choose the right book for them, helping the literacy bunch with advice and suggestions and working out the reading less of books they buy.

Keeping busy and trying to work out how to teach a new subject!

Literature Circles The DVD!

So, I'm sitting at home on report writing day, having done as much as I could on reports(still things to gather and marking to do anyway) and I'm working on my DVD for Literature Circles - we're going to have a showing for both classes next Friday and I must have it done and burn some copies for those kids who would like to take them home.

It's not easy. I only have one set of actual discussions - every time I tried to film a discussion at least one member of the group would raise her hands over her face and yelp, "Oh, no! Don't film me!" It's not as if I'm putting them on YouTube, I would argue - they're just for us, and for showing to teachers who want some idea of how this works. But it just didn't happen. I had one good discussion being led by Catherine, our integration aide, a multi-talented woman who is an artist and film maker (I have a film she took of the integration students building a model based on the book they had read, The Big Dig, and talking about it. Brilliant!). But for some reason, when I loaded it on to iMovie, it turned upside down, and I still haven't worked out how to right it and the one friend who could help me is in bed with stomach cramps. Even the computer technician at work said, "If you find out, let me know."

So most of the filming is of my voice interviewing the students about the books they were reading at the time and it sort of works, but I really prefer the discussions.

 Some of the students chose to do an author interview and I've arranged these with the authors, though I have only emailed one set of questions, because they really need some editing and I don't want to edit them too much or it won't be the students' questions, it will be mine. One set of questions still needs to be retrieved from our Public Share, where I hope the student who typed them has saved them. Those will go up on The Great Raven when done.

And then there were the book trailers - well, there was one quite good one based on Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons. I don't think the publishers would use it in YouTube, but it gets the message across and persuades viewers this book might be worth checking out. It was put together smoothly in Powerpoint and saving it to Quicktime gave me no problems. Likewise, the trailer for Cirque Du Freak by Darren Shan, which was produced properly by a student who knew how to use Moviemaker and could be converted to Quicktime via HandBrake. That was a good one too, though I wouldn't post it on YouTube, because the images were copyright. The music came from Jamendo, which is Creative Commons.

I had somewhat more trouble with the book trailer for Holes. It worked fine on a PC, but was missing its music when I loaded it on to my Mac. I was told by our info tech teacher that PowerPoint doesn't work with mp3(yet it worked okay with the Space Demons trailer) and he had recommended .wav, which doesn't work on a Mac. However, I found out the music he used, downloaded it as mp3 and recorded it on my computer, on which the PowerPoint opened as Keynote and Keynote does take mp3. Then I was able to save it to Quicktime and upload it to iMovie. Yay!

The one that REALLY gave me a headache was the trailer for Jenny Mounfield's The Icecream Man, a scary thriller for teens. Despite my warnings, the students produced it in Moviemaker, which should never be used by anyone who hasn't the experience and confidence to make it work. The trailer looked fine, but the file I was given by the student who put it together was not properly saved - it was a 66k wlmp file. And the student with the finished product took it with him and went off to Bangladesh for the rest of the school year!

Fortunately, he had left me a folder with the images and even the music. No text, but I got an idea - I would put it together using their images and music, in KeyNote. And they'd done me a storyboard with the planned text.

Unfortunately, I discovered that the text was plagiarised directly from the official book trailer and couldn't allow it to be used. I just couldn't! I don't know if that was the text they actually ended up using - they finished it off on the last day of Lit Circles classes and I was running around like a chicken with its head off, helping other students, asking them to save to Public share, saving files to my USB stick...

The tune was Pop Goes The Weasel - the original trailer had that, but this version was actually better than the one on the trailer, scarier - just imagine Pop Goes The Weasel sounding scary! So I took the images, placed them in order and recorded the music they had chosen. next year, when he returns, I'll ask the travelling student if he still has the original file and as long as he hasn't used the stolen text I will replace this one on the DVD. I don't think most kids understand the concept of plagiarism. They've done their research, they've found the information, what's all the fuss about? Or they tweak a few words and say, "But Miss, I've rewritten it!" (Rolls eyes).

Anyway, it seems to work not too badly, with the combination of images and music and I have placed it on iMovie along with the rest of the files. Time for a quick lunch and then put it together into a film!

2013: Year 8 Fundraising So Far

Again, thus year, our Year 8 students have been throwing themselves into their annual Pathways(homeroom) fundraiser. Who wold have thought when we did an emergency fundraising and packing goods for tsunami relief four years ago that it would expand into this? Really, it is only able to happen now because two of us work very well together to make it happen and the principal supports us, knowing what the kids learn from this is far and away more important than sitting in the classroom using textbooks(though we had to do that too this year, when the senior careers teacher decided it would help to make them ready for his area). We haven't been able to spend the time doing research on various charities before the vote, it had to be cut down to three weeks on the three charities we have already done, because time was taken from a number of subjects, including ours, and given to maths.

But the magic is still there. And three weeks in, the kids have raised about half of last year's amount and are likely to top it.

Yesterday a group of boys led by one who is frighteningly well organised sold iced pop cakes. They also had icy poles, but agreed to put them away for a much warmer day. Even so, they made over $100 in profit! I shut my mouth and let them get on with it, only arranging for them to take tables from my classroom and suggesting the frozen treats be put away for a warmer day. They had it all under control otherwise.

Last week a group ran two events - iced coffee and chocolate and a dodgeball game. There just weren't enough of them to do both and so two girls volunteered to help with the iced coffees. They were needed! There were crowds outside the Foods room awaiting their preordered drinks and others keen to order. It was rush-around-like-headless-chooks time, but suddenly all the preorders were done and we'd accommodated the new orders and the students had made $100 profit and had a pile of leftover ingredients they were happy to donate to whoever needed them because they had done what we told them and spent preorder money on them. There's a group soon doing milkshakes....

This task teaches them to use their imaginations, work in a team, budget and plan(oh, and some maths too)and makes them aware of other people's troubles. And it gives them something to add to their resumes.

As always, I'm so proud of them!

Western Chances Triumph!

My girls, Haley and Karyn, have achieved their scholarships. Yay! I was finally able to tell them last Friday. The official notification hasn't come in, but the lady who has been in contact said we could tell the four girls(two of mine and two in the other Year 8, nominated by my colleague Janis, the other Year 8 teacher). She had been emailing me to ask if we wanted to request anything else.

Janis and I wanted to make a little ceremony of it, calling them into her office to make the announcement, but one of them was absent and in the end, we just told them. It was such a pleasure to watch their faces light up!

It will be a couple of years of work for us all. You can't just assume they will get some more next year. You have to apply each year. They have to write each time about what this scholarship would mean to them in their pursuit of their dreams, and you have to fill in more paperwork, and then you send it off and cross your fingers.

But it's a wonderful scholarship. It's only a few hundred a year towards their study needs, but it can make such a difference. That's one thing they don't have to worry about as they study. Bless you, Terry Bracks! And bless all the folk who work there, making it happen, and all the sponsors.

As for my students, I'm so very proud of them. They deserve it.

Thank You again, VIT. I Think.

So, yet again I am trying to communicate with my professional association without which I am not allowed to teach in this state - believe me, if there was a choice of associations, I'd be out of this one! They have no competition. At least if I contact my union, who are there for MY benefit, though I don't like what they did with the last agreement, someone would answer the phone and try to find out for me what was going on. Oh, there are a couple of human beings there. I sometimes wonder if the gentleman who has kindly and calmly answered my inquiries, some of them panicked, is currently the only staff member working there. I think I once even got through on the phone, a few years ago. No more. Either you get a busy signal or a message to tell you that all their lines are busy and thank you for your patience, even though patient is NOT how I feel. My principal told me he once waited two hours before giving up. Yet according to the blurb, they av increased their telephone staff and the "hotline" hours are 7.30 am to 5.30 pm. Of course.

I'm trying to do my registration and pay my fees.  BPay isn't available, you have to pay online, but the system isn't letting me in and I can't pay till I have registered and jumped through some hoops and I can't register or pay till I have logged in. I can't even go into the office as I did last year because you have to do it all online! Even if I did go in and ask for help logging in, chances are there would just be the lonely receptionist who wouldn't know how to help me.

Sigh!

This is how I am spending the first quiet day of my well-earned break.

Think I'll shout myself some ice cream or something equally bad for me! Coffee crime brûlée or white chocolate mousse? Hmm...

Suddenly Teaching History...

At the end of last term, my timetable suddenly changed. It was always going to happen, because my students had to change from three periods of Woodwork to three period of Foods and their Foods teacher doesn't work Mondays and neither does their maths or Music teacher (well, she does, but not at our campus), or their science teacher, who is also their Foods teacher, or their history or art teacher. The original plan was that I would do ALL my English classes in one day, plus Pathways (the homeroom subject) and by the way, I would get back my ESL students, who would get no ESL support even though the ESL teacher was willing, because it would mean jiggling her timetable too. I was team teaching on Friday with another English teacher(see my post about Lit Circles) and with my Pathways colleague Jasna, and in the middle of our joint Year 8 project.

So some fiddling around was done and I got back one Friday English and the Pathways class on Wednesday. The ESL students get at least one period of ESL, even if they do have to share with Year 7.

But there was a price to pay. I had to take over one period of history, while the history teacher got landed with a period of Health. Neither of us was happy, but we have had to make the best of it and, in my case, be thankful - it could have been worse, my entire Lit Circles and Pathways projects could have been destroyed.

I am not a history teacher, though I know history in general. While the theme was the Renaissance and the Reformation, I was okay. I supported my colleague with some research periods and some Horrible Histories. Now they're doing Japan. When I ask what I can do, she tells me she doesn't know - she is still working it out herself, never having done this before. Now, it's not that I know nothing about Japan. My friend Nikki White, the Japan Librarian at the National Library, would be very annoyed with me if I didn't know anything after all these years. I just don't know what to do with the kids or what they have done in the last couple of weeks. I showed a video introducing Japan and prepared a research sheet that was also an introduction. But what now? They've had their introduction. I am tempted just to find something bizarre and over the top and make them research it. At least they'd enjoy it. I just don't know what - and their regular teacher is not currently any help. I don't blame her. But I need help and have very little time to get something put together.

AAARGH!

Stand by - I will report further next week.

Western Chances And Me

When my last Western Chances scholar, Pepa, was looked after for the last time - next year she will be with the Senior Campus teacher in charge -  I felt tempted to start the process all over again - two students this time, one girl who's in my class now, one who was with me last year. I'm still waiting patiently to hear how they went. Meanwhile, I heard, yesterday, from my first Western Chances Scholar.

In case you don't know what this is, it was founded by Terry Bracks, wife of Premier Steve Bracks, without fanfare, without massive newspaper reporting. And because it's not a government initiative, but depends on sponsors, no one can take it away from our kids except the sponsors and if they lose one, someone else will take over,

The idea is that in the poorer suburbs of Melbourne there are kids who could potentially become professionals in one area or another - engineers, doctors, singers, wherever their talent and passion lead them - but lack of money makes this difficult, sometimes impossible. So for kids like this, you can apply for a bit of money every year, to pay for textbooks, equipment, computer, calculator, singing lessons, whatever.

My first success story emailed me yesterday. She's currently doing Law/Economics at Latrobe university, and doing well. Without a hand from WC, she might still have made it, but this made it easier. A lot easier. When I knew her she was considering Engineering, but hey, she was in Year 8, kids change their minds. ;-)

But hey, one of my babies has made it to uni and will become a lawyer, an economist or both. And her poverty didn't prevent her. It wasn't a huge amount of  money and goodies, just enough to help her help herself.

Terry Bracks, ma'am, you rock!

The Occasional Pleasures Of A Job Crossover

I'm a teacher-librarian, part of a dying species since some idiot in the government some years ago decided that school principals should have the power to decide what to do with the school budget and all it gave them was the power to decide where to make cuts.

But sometimes, even now, I get a thrill.

My book clubbers get a chance to provide reader responses to manuscripts for Allen and Unwin. This is something I do wearing my library hat. One manuscript was returned unread by a student for whom it had seemed a good idea at the time, something her friends were doing(they all read theirs). It was the first time this has happened on my watch and I felt bad about it.

However, my class is doing Literature Circles(a sort of Book Club for the classroom) with another class at the moment and one group had finished reading a book by this author. They had LOVED it, though not the ending(Later I may see if I can arrange an interview with this author and they can ask him themselves about the ending).

What to do with them while the rest of the class finishes? I had an idea. As a test run, I printed off copies of the first three chapters of the neglected manuscript for them - I will do more if they want it -  and asked if they'd be interested in reading a book by this author that isn't yet published. Would they? Is the Pope a Catholic?

This week, they not only read some more, they broke out the Literature Circles roles and began to discuss it!

How cool is that, eh? My role as a teacher librarian crossing over with my role as a classroom teacher and a bunch of kids doing something they found exciting.

I nearly cried for joy.

Thank You, VIT...I Think

Today I received the following email in my in box:


Dear Susan
The Victorian Institute of Teaching has conducted a customer service review in an effort to improve communication and service delivery. We received responses from more than 1800 teachers and principals.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey. We are listening to your feedback and responding by:

• updating information on our website at www.vit.vic.edu.au to help you with the registration process
• simplifying the registration process by providing an individualised portal where you can complete your registration tasks (such as renewal of registration and criminal record check) online and make payments quickly and efficiently
• doubling the customer service team to take your calls
• extending the Teacher Hotline hours from 7.30 am to 7.00 pm in the peak registration renewal period from August 2013 to February 2014 to cover times when you need to call us
• introducing a more durable plastic registration card, which can also be used as a Working With Children card.

These changes are part of an Institute-wide effort to provide better systems to support annual registration.
You will receive your annual invoice during August. It will explain what you need to do to complete your registration tasks online and make sure that you are registered to teach in 2014.
We value your feedback and will continue to monitor our systems to provide the best support for you through the registration process.

It was signed by a lady called Melanie, but added a comment that this was an automated email and we shouldn't answer it, but we were welcome to phone.

Thank you, Melanie. The thing is, they're all things that any good organisation should be able to do, let alone our compulsory professional association, and you were already allowing us to do it all online, even do it from home (something that eventually happened after there were enough complaints about only being able to do the compulsory online stuff from work). And extending the hotline hours isn't going to help if no one can get through anyway. I don't know anyone who ever managed to get through to the hotline. It was supposed to be going till 5.30 pm, but as I never managed to get through to anyone during the day, I decided i would hand in my paperwork in person and went to the building in Melbourne at 4.40 pm. I only found one staff member there, a poor little receptionist who had been left all alone, and had no idea what I needed to know, though she took my paperwork to be handed over later. Heaven knows where the hotline folk were! I'm sure there was a good reason for this, but with the lack of communication, I still haven't found out what it was. Maybe the extra staff will help, but I doubt it.

I did, once, by complete chance, get a response from a human being by email, and have asked the poor man all my questions since, because I don't know who else to ask.

Please, VIT - this is compulsory. I can't work in a Victorian school without paying you my fees and jumping through the various hoops you have set up for me. Remember, during the workday we're in class or preparing classes. I get about 20 minutes a day lunch break and a few minutes more for morning tea. And then, after school, we have two meetings a week.

At least make it easy to communicate and give us a few email addresses for when we can't get through by phone. 

Reading Matters and Class Stuff

The kids thoroughly enjoyed the Reading Matters student day. They got to hear some favourites and discover new ones. They bought books. It was a tension-filled morning when one student arrived fifteen minutes late, nearly causing us to miss our train, then there were those whose Myki cards were empty! And lunchtime in the busy food court! We will go to a fast food joint next time.

At school, both literature circles and Pathways have gone very well and we had plans continuing into next term...and suddenly we've had a major timetable change and my four period day has been moved from Friday to Monday and both programs could collapse if not fixed. It's the part timers and in this case the PE staff who wanted to have time in the gym, which they currently must share.

Aaargh! I try, I really try to do my teaching so that kids can get something out of it, but I am, it seems, at the mercy of the college timetable. 

Lit Circles The Continuing Adventure(from my other blog)

Yesterday, we started Literature Circles.

This year, I decided the best way to do it was with two classes and made my offer to a Year 7 English teacher who had a double period at the same time as me. We both had to do it anyway and it would save us competing for venue(library) and resources(books) as well as giving our students a wider range of choices.

Before beginning, I asked my own students which of them had done it before(some had done it in primary school) and invited them to tell me what they thought it was.

One of them asked, "Is it like a book club?" Not like MY book club, of course, but definitely like an adult one and I agreed: "Yes, that's exactly what it is! It's book club for the classroom."

Because we have had the same books for the last couple of years and there were going to be a large number of readers, I took a look at my shelves and among the class sets and chose some I thought they might like and that had meat for discussion.

Holes used to be the Year 8 class text, before we went to Lit Circles. It's a wonderful book, and students loved it and last year, several asked for it in the library. I made that available. We had more than enough copies. There's a group of four reading it.

I had taught Stephen Herrick's The Simple Gift to Year 11, who enjoyed it, even those who whined loudly about our other class texts, and it had also been on our Year 10 list. It's a verse novel, not difficult reading, but sophisticated concepts for good readers to discuss. We have a group doing it.

Looking For Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta was a Year 10 book at one time, also, but Year 10 teachers got sick of it, so it was out. I offered that too. There was some interest in it, but mostly by students who couldn't handle it. Reluctantly, I had to concede this one won't run this time.

We definitely needed some extra choices, because there's a Year 8(not mine) that did it last year.

So, apart from the above, here's what was chosen: Specky Magee,  Cirque Du Freak by Darren Shan, Mao's Last Dancer junior edition, by Li Cunxin, The Ice Cream Man by Jenny Mounfield,  A Ghost In My Suitcase by Gabrielle Wang, Space Demons by Gillian Rubinstein and a short book called The Big Dig by Meg McKinlay. It's kind of nice that all but two of these books are Australian published. It's not that we did the patriotic thing, it just worked out that way. I've read them all except Specky Magee(next project, thank goodness it's short!).

I was sad that some of the wonderful books from the last two years aren't on the list - Burn Bright and Dragonkeeper and Once. It's not that they had no interest, but that some of the interest was from students who couldn't handle them - well, they could handle Once, but we tried to give first choice where possible and work out the groups so that where there was a student who needed support to get through a book, there was at least one good reader with a kind heart who would help them.

Which brings me to the process of choosing groups. We had a mixture of reading levels. There are Year 7 students reading at Year 12 level and Year 8 students reading at Grade 2 and 3 level. The choice of books was wide enough to cater for them all, more or less, as long as we had aides to help the Integration students, but we had one Integration student who would have been highly offended at being placed with that group, so we gave him a mainstream book that was not too hard and the aide sat with the group. We had students who would fight if we put them together and others who would waste time and some who would put aside their own work to help others who would not be grateful, leaving their own work undone. I would have loved to have a group of high-skill readers who could make the most of it, as I have had in previous years, but they made different choices, so we settled for at least two good readers where we could get them.

All this and giving them their choices of book! We did ask them not to choose a book they had read before, as it would bore them and ruin any chance of a good discussion if someone said, "So, what do you think happens next?" and someone else already knew! Or if someone knew already WHY a character did this or that. We did have to allow one student who had seen the movie to read the book, or there wouldn't have been a group, and besides, he might come to appreciate the differences between a book and even a film that was fairly faithful to it.

Even as it was, I panicked a bit when a student told me he'd suddenly realised he had read this book after all. Turned out he hadn't - he was confusing it with something else.

So, yesterday, after a lot of running around and preparation, we got the library set up and the books ready to collect and then... All the year 7 students were gathered at the other end of the library to be yelled at over a lunchtime incident, for about twenty five minutes! That took a large chunk out of our teaching time and made a negative start. I sat with my year 8 students, keeping them occupied while we waited, having to speak softly in order not to disturb the drama on the other side of the library.

Still, we got going, beginning with getting them into their groups and practising with a short story before they began reading. We had already shown them some discussions from a previous year( how glad I am I had the idea of videoing them!) and most had agreed they did have a better idea of what was expected after seeing them.

They only had about half an hour to read after the interruption and delay, but got into it with a good will. There were already discussions going, arguing about word meanings, read alouds, agreement of how much they should read. One student asked to borrow his novel. I had to say no; last year I lent out novels which never came back and we're short as a result, but mainly, you have to trust people to remember to bring the book to class. And if he was anything like me he'd read the book in an evening and twiddle his thumbs while others caught up. You're supposed to discuss it as you go.

Next week I will be at Reading Matters and my colleague will have to explain about roles. Lucky man!

Ebook Success!

Alfred has finished his ebook, complete with voiceover, on the Lighthouse iPad. It was wonderful. I think I will have to give his aide, Catherine, a box of chocolates next week, to thank her for the amount of trouble she took getting this done. I am lucky - she is a retired teacher who decided to come back into the school system, but our aides in general are very very good.

It was exactly what I had had in mind when I made up this assignment - the simple pictures and sentences on each page and the young man's voice reading it. He did have to have the occasional gentle whispered prompt from his aide, but in general, he did all the things he needed to do - chose pictures that told the story, put them - mostly - in order and read from them. And the student is rather proud of this, despite all the arguing he did with his aide when he was working on it! He asked me if I would be showing it to the other teachers and I said I would, as soon as I can get it on my own iPad.

I have spoken to the speech therapist who runs Lighthouse and discussed the buying of this particular app, plus a more sophisticated one, for all students, but she was ahead of me in this, and also said she should be able to configure the computer for email. That means Alfred can download it on his own iPad and show his parents, but at this stage only in PDF, which is unlikely to have sound, because he only has the Kindle app, not iBooks. So if we want this project to work, we need to have access to iBooks on the student accounts, plus access to email they can use to send work to their teachers. There WAS a student email set up, but the principal suggested it might not be a good idea, because all the students had the same login, which might lead to anonymous bullying. Back to the drawing board! :-(

I will be showing him what this student has done as soon as I can, so he understands what can be done with an iPad provided we have given the students access to what they need.

Fingers crossed!

More iPad ramblings or: Making Ebooks!

My integration student has been making an ebook!

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but this morning I actually got to look at it. And his aide was back, so he had one to one attention which I can't give him.

Last Friday I was absent in the afternoon, gone home with a temperature to moan and groan in my bed, but before I left I had a chat with him and asked him to continue gathering photos from Up, the movie he has been studying. He was to put them in order and keep them on the iPad camera roll for when he had time to put them together. He got the Lighthouse iPad in exchange for his and did what I had asked him.

Today, his aide helped him put the photos on the ebook creation app, BookBuilder. BookBuilder is really only good for picture books, with a little bit of text, but for that it's terrific. It isn't finished, but when it is, the integration aides will arrange to have email configured on it so that it can be emailed from the iPad both to him and to me. Then he can take his iPad home and show his achievement to his parents and I can show his achievement to staff looking for ways to use the iPad.

And then we can go through the whole business of trying to get that particular app made available to students who aren't integration students and so on and so forth... And email made available to them all, so they can email their work to their teachers... (They were working on that and it was all set up when a problem was pointed out and they had to start all over again).

But meanwhile, I'm thrilled to bits that this particular experiment seems to be working and very happy with this students and think his aide - who is also excited about this - deserves several bouquets.

Last Book Club Meeting For Term 1

In the end, our final meeting for the term was just a party. I bought goodies for the students to enjoy and oh, they did! Talk about locusts! ;-)

Priyanka didn't turn up because her other passion is soccer and there was a student versus staff game going, but she will be back next term. The others were there, from Year 7 to 9, eating, drinking horribly strong lime cordial and chatting. Rakibur wanted to see what his reward could be from the Allen and Unwin web site, once he finished reading the manuscript, so he went on line and looked at the catalogue, then went out to see the last few minutes of the soccer game.

And the others spread out after they had eaten and drunk enough. I did ask if they wanted anything to read for the holidays, but they reminded me with a smile that they had manuscripts to read. Two of them read them then and there. Emily lay across the comfy chairs, reading Pretty Little Liars and telling me how wonderful it was. Kaitlyn sat at a table with her manuscript. Nusaiba and her friends joined us for the first time; they have taken manuscripts for the first time too. They have taken a new student under their wings and brought her along, though she isn't really a reader, but it's nice to know this girl, who's in my homeroom, is not alone. Perhaps soon I can find some reading matter she'll enjoy.

At the end, some of them helped me tidy up and I gave away the last f the food to those who wanted it, not that there was much left. I gave Kaitlyn the rest of the cordial, which she swears she can drink neat!

Next step is to get permission for the Reading Matters excursion. It's not free, but not expensive and such a nice thing to do.

Did I ever mention I love running Book Club and the kids in it?