Another Extra Help Push

Here’s another YouTube video showing how I’d fix two sentences of student writing, from two different essays.

Fixing student sentences is hard, and they all make many of the same mistakes. A collection of such mistakes, and how to fix them, may be beneficial in the long run; but I wonder if even the students for whom I’m making these will view them.

Extra Help “Pushed”

As I said I would do, I made the first few videos of a series (of about 55-60) related to providing extra help for the writers in my history class.  You’re actually getting to see them first, because I’m also posting them to the student’s user page, but if I know this particular student, he won’t check his history wiki page until the end of the Thanksgiving break at this point.

When he does, these three videos will be waiting for him.

This is a different kind of model for extra help, though.  It used to be that we had to give a kid a pass to come to extra help in the afternoons, and then hope he’d show up (if sports or extracurricular activities weren’t somehow more interesting or pressing).  These videos ‘belong’ in a sense to this particular student, though. They’ll reside on his homepage on our classroom wiki, and he’ll be able to review them as many times as he needs; if he deletes them, they’re gone, and he’s no longer troubled by them.

Can every teacher in America deliver this kind of “pushed” extra help? Maybe, maybe not.  But it’s a different model of correction and assistance, and one that bears at least a little experimentation.

Food for Video?

So… I’m digging into the essays, and I decide to type up a few sentences from each student.  There are some doozies.  Some are horrific, 71-word run-on sentences that occupy several lines of typed text.

Also the illegal govenrment could be good and the illegal govenrment would not have been in power if people could not have been in its favor so there is no such thing as an illegal government because people where in favor of it and made it rise to power it is just a bad govenrment that was chosen so I would not go to civil war against a government that was chosen by the people that want the civil war against it.

You’ll notice that there’s not a single reference to Rome, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, or any of the other authors we read this term in that entire sentence.

On the other hand, the phrase “illegal government” appears three times, and the word government appears five times.  The phrase “civil war” appears twice.  Since the essay question was based on Brutus’s question to his friends in Plutarch, “which is better, a civil war or an illegal government?” I guess I should give them a modicum of credit for at least knowing the terms… oh wait, these terms are the ones from the essay question.

Sentence fragments. Two words… the student memorized a list of words relevant to the essay, but then had no idea how to construct them into a sentence.  There are comma splices, these things are so bad that it took me ten minutes to figure out how to do one to show you.  Spellign erars ov evan cmon worsd.

And I thought… here’s a set of videos!

Now, I don’t have time this week to turn all fifty-one of these ghastly clunkers of sentences or paragraphs into sentences. But I bet I could turn a lot of them into short explanatory videos over Thanksgiving, and put them on the kids’ user pages on the wiki.  In some obvious place, of course. Where they’d have to notice them.

I could give them all a copy of the “worst clunky sentences” of the exam, and they could see how they read in the public eye.

But I like the idea of making the sentences into short videos, and explain how to fix their critical problems.  Do you, my readers, want to see?

Exams

I’ve not been writing much this week because exams have occupied much of my attention.  From Tuesday through Saturday this week, students at my school are sitting for an hour and a half at a time, scribbling in answers to multiple choice questions, answering cloze questions, and occasionally writing essays.

My students wrote essays.  The minute-glass was there.  It turned over three times.  They wrote three twenty-minute-long essays, and then each of them wrote some comments on one essay from a classmate.

I hate to say it, but the short-form comments were way better than the long-form essays.  Of course they were. That’s the format that students write in today, in the form of Facebook comments and text messages.

Afterward, most felt they had done best on the second essay, after they’d gotten warmed up.  It had taken them 20 minutes or more to feel that they were “ready to write”.  The first essay was terrible, they’d felt.  The second essay was better, they decided; the third, as their attention and interest flagged, was not as horrible as the first but not as good as the second.  We spent some time in class graphing these experiences yesterday, since we still had some regular classes after the exams.

In truth, I found that they’d analyzed themselves pretty well, but incorrectly.  The second essays tended to be better in terms of writing skill.  But they had less meat in them — fewer details, less understanding of the texts.  The first essays tended to be the ones that they’d studied hardest for — they had the names of specific historical figures, references to specific events.  The third essays were ok in terms of writing, but the least meaty.  So, in general, my students wrote three essays on Tuesday: a poor essay on something they knew well; wrote a good essay on something they knew less well; and wrote a mediocre essay about essentially nothing at all.

Sigh.

And people wonder why teaching is such a difficult profession.

Labyrinth Video

It’s been the site of a number of classroom visits, but I figured you all might like to see the site of the labyrinth and the surrounding views.  As you can see, there are several big piles of dirt by the labyrinth, two of which were already there (and one of which was dumped on top of the southwest curve of the labyrinth).  Directly south is a storage shed which acts as the makeshift kitchen for our concessions stand at the ball field, and the ballfield is to the east.  North-north-west is the drainage pond and the home of our assistant headmaster.

Not a perfect place for archaeoastronomy, but not horrible, either.

The Poverty Trap

A lot of the things that happen on my Twitter feed concern me not at all. It’s a broad but not particularly deep stream of information.  I dip my fingers in every so often; I pour some things in every so often.  But then again, every so often I find a piece of information that I know has circled to my mind from the deep Ocean of truth out there somewhere.  And I wonder how to communicate this to my students.

Pieces of information like this nugget: If you make less than $40,000 a year, you’re stuck in a kind of poverty if you live in the United States.

A graph of the Poverty Trap

Here’s the thing… If you and your family of three earn less than $20,000 a year here, you get assistance from the Federal government and from the states, because you are — you know — poor.

But after you earn more than $20,000 a year, those subsidies in the form of food stamps and housing assistance start to go away; and frequently those sorts of businesses have substantial side-costs: transit, perhaps clothes or uniforms.  And the subsidies that made life possible beforehand go away, too:  You lose access to subsidized health care, and child care.  Your rent support vanishes.  And so your expenses jump, to eat most of the extra that you may have earned… up to about $20,000 more above $20,000.  Or $40,000 a year, which works out to $19 or $20 an hour.

I don’t make $20 an hour.  Am I in poverty?  Well, no. But I certainly have subsidized housing, in the form of an apartment in one of the school dormitories.  I eat subsidized food in the school dining hall.  And while I DO pay my own health care costs, the’ve climbed (reliably) in unpredictable ways for years now.

Should we teach this in schools? How? When?  And more importantly, how do we as a nation fix this problem?

Writing Guide: Colored Sentence Structure

Bill Sullivan commented on an earlier post that he made a Jing video that used color to help students identify the different parts of a sentence in Latin class.  I thought, hey, what a cool idea!

I couldn’t wait to try it.  Here it is — an analysis of subject, predicate, and the two main kinds of modifiers of those two main elements of any sentence. In color:

Another Writing Guide

I like making them, and I hope they’ll be helpful to my students in prepping for their essays for the history exam tomorrow:

What do you think?  Is this one of education’s futures?

More Writing Guides

Here’s another writing guide, this time on sentence structure, and how the same information can be encoded in a written sentence in a variety of ways:

I love that making these videos is so easy, and that the same lesson can be taught to a kid again and again, with none of the frustration on my part and all of the learning on the kid. When the kid “gets it” — she won’t have to watch the video any more; it will have served its purpose.  But it will be there for the next generation of student, whenever that student comes along.

Part of me worries.  If it’s this easy to create digital content that’s educational, and short, and directed, and specific — what will teachers do in the future?  Make content, for certain, and probably more than they do now.  Evaluate specific assignments? Yes, that too, and probably more than they do now.  But for all that, I don’t know any teachers who got into this business of teaching because they wanted to make worksheets and grade papers.

Simple Writing Videos

Making writing videos is ridiculously easy, using the premium version of Jing (and I imagine it’s almost as easy with the basic, free version):

And since my students don’t have access (officially) to YouTube, I’ve actually double-saved and double-shared them.  They’re online at YouTube, for everyone here and there who’d like to use these short writing guidelines; they’re also available to my students on our wiki, as blog entries.  This means that I get credit for the work in two places — with my school, and with my online audience.

I was trying to explain this to a colleague on Friday, and she almost got it.  Maybe she did get it, and just was too concerned about potential for disaster to go all the way.  But increasingly, as teachers, we can be judged by our online presence and ability, and perhaps we should be.  Is the maker of such videos as these someone you want working at your school? Will such a teacher reach your students more effectively over the long run than a teacher who isn’t “wired”?  In some ways, it’s too early to say. 

In other ways, it’s way too late.  A few hundred such of these videos could easily teach a student more about writing and sentence structure than all thousand pages of Warriner’s Grammar of the English Language.  And yet the world is better off with MORE such explanations rather than less.  There’s more chance for people to “get it” when they have a multitude of instructors and guides — and not just the one to whom they happen to be assigned. 

There’s a potential revolution in the making, here.