new plans

[velvetpage]

I've scrapped my math lesson in favour of some photocopied worksheets on multiplication.

I've scrapped the guided reading and independent writing in favour of a reader's theatre activity - Beauty and the Beast, the non-Disney version.

Social Studies is going ahead as planned, but I'm going to spend a lot of time showing those grade 4's the life cycle of West Coast Salmon, and relatively little trying to get them to actually do work.

The last period of the day is called "rotating clubs", and this is the third week with the same group. I hand out decks of cards and they play a school appropriate version of War that I call High-Low. They know how to play it, and I can almost use the time as prep. I'll just have to step in now and again to remind people that looking at your cards and choosing the highest one to play next is CHEATING.

Essentially, I have streamlined this day to reflect my own mood and the fact that about a quarter of my students will be absent for Eid. I have thrown the photocopying restrictions to the wind, rationalizing the expense with the knowledge that half the pages (the Reader's Theatre scripts) will be put in an envelope for next year when I do the same play. As for the rest of it, well, I don't photocopy very much through the week, so doing it in large quantities occasionally isn't that big a deal.

The whole plan has the benefit of being able to write under Monday's plan, "See Thursday Math", "See Friday Literacy", and basically having two days ready to go. That should make life much easier for next week too.

If my mood is still down by next Friday, though, I'm taking a mental health day. I'm not letting this get out of hand, and I'm not sacrificing myself on the altar of the teaching profession.

The strike vote was 92% in favour. That's a reasonably strong mandate from a board which has experienced a strike only four years ago and a work-to-rule in 2003. Now it just remains to be seen what the Union will do with it, and what the province's response will be. Our only real hope for avoiding a strike is if the province steps in in the spring to offer funding for the extra prep time. Even then, there's a good chance our board will be hard-headed about it and we'll go out anyway.

Comments

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Rest as much as you can -- the day you've outlined above is very sound. I hope it goes smoothly.

I have a question -- and sorry if I've asked this before, I can't quite remember -- do you ever have trouble with using playing cards with some of the kids? By which I mean, do their parents ever object to it? My cousin's husband (Italian Catholic) refused to let their kids anywhere near playing cards, because he "didn't want them exposed to gambling", and my ex-husband's teachers in a fundamentalist church-run "school" (that's a whole other story) were scandalized one day when he brought a deck to class. It's not something I hear about often, but I'm curious to see if you've ever had to deal with that sort of thing. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I've never had anyone tell me I couldn't use playing cards, though I never teach exactly how to gamble (quite honestly, I've never played for money myself so I'm not sure how) and I don't teach the games most closely associated with gambling like blackjack or poker. Mostly, I use cards as a way to teach basic math. Kids who have had exposure to Rummy or other points-counting games are usually one up when it comes to integers. Anyone who has played cribbage can add, at least to 31. Etc, etc.

However, I won't tell you about some of the issues I've had surrounding Harry Potter or even the mention of role-playing games. Suffice it to say there are a lot of small-minded, overprotective parents out there who aren't prepared to see the good in something because they're too afraid of finding a speck of bad.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Oh, believe me, I know all too well about that (my high school, back in the 80s, was a target for book banning). *eyeroll*

The thing that I thought was weird was that from what I could tell, it didn't matter if the game being played actually could be used to gamble -- just the very presence of cards was a problem. Maybe also the distant association with tarot was part of it, too, come to think of it. *shrug*

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Was that the incident where "A Jest of God" by Margaret Lawrence was being taught poorly, and students were being asked to read inappropriate passages out loud? My dad was on the committee that looked into banning the book - an outside observer from a religious institution, basically. He said that the biggest problem was not the book itself but how it was taught, and if it had been taught with sensitivity, it would not have been a problem.

I believe I was in grade 4 at the time.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

In Peterborough County in 1987 (there were other attempts to ban books, but this is the one that hit me directly), the issue was the very presence of that book and others (The Diviners and Catcher In The Rye, in particular) in the school at all, let alone on the curriculum. Note that there were always other books that students could read should they object to the ones on the curriculum, and it's not as if they couldn't be avoided entirely in the library. The parents who were against these books could easily have said "I would prefer my child read something else" and those kids could read something like The Crucible, instead.

No student was ever asked to read inappropriate passages aloud -- I've never even heard that suggested before, actually -- we rarely ever read books aloud in our high school English classes at all (except Shakespeare's plays, of course). Not to contradict your dad, but that round, at least, had nothing to do with how the books were taught. The parents involved whose kids went to my high school (for what it's worth, they were members of the same fundamentalist church that my then-future now-ex-husband's family belonged to), along with their pastor (who didn't have any kids in high school) were the very ones who read the questionable passages out loud, at length, at protests (including some book burning) and board meetings. Out of context, of course. They didn't want any student to read the books -- but they wound up encouraging more to do so because they suddenly realized hey, there's naughty bits! *chuckle* Oopsie...

The head of my English Department was best friends with Margaret Laurence, and this all came to a head when she was battling cancer. It certainly was not what she needed at that point in time. The fact that our school was the only one in the county not to give in to those demands remains a point of pride there. I was in the same class as one of the kids whose mother was protesting this. At least, until they formed their own "academy" and yanked their kids out of school to get a substandard education in a church basement...

Somewhere at my dad's I've got all the clippings from that era stashed away; it really made me angry that total strangers thought they could tell me what to read. I loved The Diviners, but I didn't think much of A Jest of God and Catcher In The Rye -- and it had nothing to do with swearing and sex. I already knew much better places to find those things. :D

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

My memory of the events is vague and second-hand at best. I know my dad was on the committee in question because he was asked to be by the parents trying to ban the books, and I know he thought it was being blown mightily out of proportion and the books should not have been taken out of schools. Beyond that, I don't remember the details.

I did a seminar in my librarianship course about censorship and selection. It was interesting, but we ended up avoiding the topic as much as we could, advising teachers to read their board's selection policies and then adhere to them to avoid the problem. A cop-out, certainly, but the goal was marks.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer. :)