Sorry to put a damper on the beginning of your summer, but you should start thinking about all these things now. What plans do you have to make it through next year? It’s shaping up to be even leaner than this past year. How do you plan to do your job next year with fewer resources and very likely more students than you’ve ever had in the past? What’s happening in your district and/or school that has you worried? And, most importantly, what do you plan to do about it?Similar Posts:

None Found

There are a total of seven meetings I’m supposed to hold, one before summer school starts and the others weekly. Mind you, the English 1 teachers (five of them on my campus) will not get paid for this time. I’m taking bets on how long it takes them to realize this. Over or under: 2 meetings. Also, don’t know if you’ve noticed, but many teachers aren’t very inclined to plan en masse despite what multiple “professional development” plans say. Neither are they very receptive to talking through problems and coming up with solutions during meetings. The talk will happen, the solutions will not.

I wrestle with how to best make use of our time. The meeting today will be a Q/A session, really, and I don’t see it going longer than twenty minutes. I’d love to work with teachers on developing ideas, crafting units that address the needs of these students, and developing curriculum that fills in the gaps these students have. What I see on the horizon is meeting weekly with one out of the five teachers. I haven’t even started officially and I’m already thinking this is a waste of district money in a time where we cannot afford it. This is kind of an extension of my troubles with being the technology coordinator during the regular year, too.

What has your experience been like as or with a resource teacher? Any ideas for how I can best help my teachers? Any thoughts on how I can best make sure they cover the summer pacing guide? What do I do if I know they are just hitting play each day or some other fluffy summer “teaching”? What do you do if you’re offering something potentially worthwhile and no one is biting? What if you’re offering something your district believes so much in they put dollars behind it? What can I do if I make myself available and no one takes me up?Similar Posts:

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Vision

“Tell me about your project. What do you see on the screen? What are you doing a documentary about?”

Wait. It started earlier than that.

“What do you notice? What works and what doesn’t?”

Yeah, somewhere around there is when my realization began.

I mentioned this in an earlier entry, lamenting the fact that students regularly do not know why one thing is better than another. My realization happened when it dawned on me that this is normal, that part of my job is to help them see such things, that I know what they don’t and it’s OK to tell them outright.

I spent the bulk of my career so far giving the shoulder shrug to the question, “What do you think it means, Mr. Seal?” I wanted students to reach their own conclusions and to discover meaning for themselves. I still want that, but I realize that there’s a step or two between hand holding and independence. Giving students a vision for where they can go provides possibility where they might not have seen it before, even if that vision is created by someone else.

Back To The Videos

So we watch these videos, I point out what I think works, and ask for student input. I’m seeing storyboards come together in blatant attempts to mimic structures we’ve seen in other videos, but with enough difference to show a student struggling with concepts instead of simply imitating. Soon, I’m starting to hear students use the language of film and even make comments in their groups using techniques that I’ve shown them.

Shazam! And now I’m with my English 3 students, working on the latest piece of writing. Students struggle. I point out what I think works and ask for student input. They need to pick two short stories of O’Brien’s to discuss and as students focus on the one story they like, I come around with options for what their second story should be. “So ‘Love’ and ‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ are both about love, right? But what happens to the love each story starts out with? What do you think O’Brien’s point is, then?” Soon, I’m starting to hear students use the language of literature and even make comments about other stories using techniques I’ve shown them.

I’m no longer shrugging at the “What do you think” question. And this is why I feel like an idiot, because I shrugged for so long.

Lesson

“Tell me about your project. What do you see on the screen? What are you doing a documentary about?”

And a group says, “Cars.”

I then launch into a description of what they should do this Saturday: take a drive down Auto Row with a camera pointed out the passenger-side window, zoomed in close on all the cars they pass by. Do this a couple of times, maybe even getting out of the car and walking down the sidewalk. The opening of the video should be that footage with a voice over, setting up what the video will be about, roughly ten seconds worth of something interesting to say about cars. They say they want to do a video about racing, import cars specifically. “Any possibility that there are people here at school who prefer muscle cars to imports? Maybe you could compare those two groups.” We go on from there.

The final product from these students begins with a montage of still shots: cars in the school parking lot with a voice over about different kinds of vehicles. They move on to interview an import fanatic and then a muscle car owner. They took my idea, expanded upon it, and made it their own.

And I’m seeing the exact same thing in my English classes: ideas that I suggested, but that students turned into an original product. Why didn’t I learn this lesson a long time ago? It’s OK to give your interpretation because, with only a little nudging, students will give you their own spin on your thoughts. And at the other end of this spectrum are a bunch of students who have absolutely no idea how to begin. Your ideas give them that beginning.Similar Posts:

• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1
• Beginning A Documentary
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We broke each one down. Is the mood appropriate? How does it achieve that mood? What angles worked? Did it have the five required? What problems were there? What worked well? A lot of silence, mostly me pointing out what works according to my limited and self-taught film critique skills. But this helped build a language for students to use. Without me pointing out things in a shot that work, the way the composition draws the eye in or has too much going on for us to focus, they had nothing to say. They still tend toward silence, but even parroting what I’d said about earlier videos is a step toward them drawing their own conclusions. The revelation that things work better without music was almost entirely theirs.

What We Watched

• Who’s In Residence? – Good use of POV shots, this is an interesting take on the whole Door Scene
• Locke High School AFI Door Scene – Several angles to discuss, this piece shows an actor not smiling, an important lesson my students took and applied to their Door Scene the following day.
• Claim To Fame: Union, New Jersey – The entire videos seeks to answer a single question and that gives the filmmakers a focus, which surely helped them make editing decisions. Ongoing establishing shots give a good idea what the town is like.
• Four Generations (Part One) (Part Two) – At the spot where the family receives the water buffalo (the opening minute or so of part two of this project), we decided it would have been an even more powerful scene without the music. The grandmother is speechless and that is overpowered by the sugary, though well-performed, string soundtrack. The music just so obviously manipulates your emotions that it detracts from how emotional that moment is. Nice observation, class!
• Global Depot Materials Manager – This one was the template for a lot of my students. The way the piece is framed in a single day via the opening and closing shots of the car she drives gave students ideas about what they could do. The way this video handles doors is key, something we spent time in deliberate observation of, using our experience with the Door Scene as a contrast.
• Growing Up Online intro clip (from 2:19 to 5:13) – Another study in establishing shots, this helped set the idea of showing examples of the video’s topic and using interviews.
• Storyboarding – Several basic shots are discussed quickly, giving at least a rudimentary vocabulary to press forward with.

And with that, we dove into making our own videos.

For Your Consideration

I thought about using Roger & Me, Is Wal-Mart Good For America, Murderball, and Wordplay. Almost anything from Frontline would work; using opening credits from TV shows to examine tone and mood is a possibility; one of the extras on About Schmidt demonstrates interesting work with establishing shots.

Speaking strictly of camera technique as storytelling device, how else could you set students up for success when basically the assignment is to take a camera out and investigate the topic you chose? What other examples would you show? How would you frame the discussion? Which resources would you make available?Similar Posts:

• We’ve Begun
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• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 2
• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1
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Some teachers are there for months, others for years.

Of the teachers covered in the piece on This American Life, two stay in my mind. One threw a chair across the room and it accidentally hit a kid (listen at 12:19). That teacher should be let go. Another’s principal leveled an abuse charge because he let a swear word fly in a conversation with another teacher as he walked past an open eighth-grade classroom (listen at 14:30). That teacher should be brought back.

If the teacher really did abuse a kid, they wait. If the teacher didn’t do anything wrong, they wait. In either case, the actual issues that brought the teacher to the Rubber Room are not dealt with. So even though there is clearly a problem, it’s ignored.

Rubber Rooms are simply a way to avoid the difficulty of saying, “You should no longer be a teacher. Good-bye.” There’s an admission of a problem by the creation of Rubber Rooms, but there’s no solution provided by putting these people into a system that is basically a prison. I’m horrified at what Rubber Rooms suggest about the way my profession works.Similar Posts:

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