I haven't commented in a while. I've been enjoying an unexpected week off. Because of unpaid furlough days, LAUSD like many districts just closed the schools for this whole week of Thanksgiving. It's been a salvation for me. Last week I experienced the "Perfect Storm" of obligations that left me staggering towards Friday.
I had a big housewarming party on Sunday Nov 14, so I was getting ready for that the whole week before. The party was a big success, but I should have been getting my grades ready since they were due Weds Nov 17. That realization hit me on Monday, along with the need to finish grading the written part of the periodic assessment and teach a class at National University Monday and Wednesday night. Whew! This is what made the week of Nov 15 the perfect storm of obligation, so I didn't sleep much and stumbled across the grading finish line a day late, on Thursday--just in time to collapse into this vacation week.
I know this sounds like more whining, so I want to counteract that with another burst of enthusiasm for the MyAccess online writing program. I had the laptop carts in my room for a couple of weeks, and the boys have been working on their essays every day. The more I use this program the more I like it. It leads the boys to correct errors in their writing and then gives them instant feedback in the form of a numerical score. As they make corrections or add more content, they see their score go up.
A high level of competitiveness is cited as one of the characteristics of the male brain (at least most of them), and one day last week some of the boys were actually competing out loud to see who could get the highest rating on their compositions. They even called out their scores in excitement as they made changes to improve their essays. That really sold me. I realized that this program had generated the elusive "intrinsic motivation," since the students wanted to improve their writing for its own sake.
Even if I graded in detail everything they wrote every night (something I have never been able to manage and few teachers do) I couldn't match the instant feedback they get from this program. They may groan when they see all of the spelling and other errors highlighted in their writing, but they can get to work and correct them one by one. That is what good writing requires--patient re-examination of what you've written in the form of correction, expansion, revision.
There's still plenty of work for the teacher in this program. The more generic recommendations about description, structure, and style will always require the teacher to illuminate and elaborate. This program doesn't replace the teacher as much as amplify what the teacher can accomplish. It is the best example I have encountered of how technology can make the teacher much more effective. I look forward to using it throughout the rest of the year.
Time for another little detour. I recently saw the movie "Unstoppable" with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. It's about a runaway train in Pennsylvania that is carrying a load of toxic chemicals and threatens mass destruction in a highly populated area. It's thrilling from beginning to end. The human characters, especially Washington as a veteran train engineer, are well done, but the train itself is the star--menacing, implacable, inexorable.
Afterward it occurred to me that this runaway train was a profound metaphor (I am an English teacher after all!) for the state of American capitalism--out of control, threatening to destroy millions of people, highly toxic, and driven by greed and arrogance. Without giving away the ending, suffice it to say that the golf-playing CEO who is more concerned about the stock price than the potential human suffering DOES NOT save the day. Anyway, I highly recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment