First real week

On Tuesday I led a few really good discussions about bullying as a pre-reading activity for an article Mrs. F gave out Wednesday. She'd distributed the discussion question worksheet on Monday, with twelve questions on it like: "Do you think there is a bullying problem in this school? Who is more at fault, the bullies or the bystanders? Do you think parents should have the right to sue the district if their child continues to be bullied?" Any one of those questions could have led to a full-period (50-minute) discussion, in my opinion, and in the end I didn't even cover all the questions.

Several students in all three classes were unsure of what the word "bystander" meant, which I found ironic since it was exactly the bystander syndrome that had led to my downfall when the fight that had started in my classroom moved to the hallway. I posed a few scenarios for them and really probed their moral fiber. A few time Mrs. F felt compelled to intervene because they were giving answers like, "If someone's just irritating, they're asking for it and that's not bullying." One student claimed that there was no bullying problem at their school because everyone in the school was black. Mrs. F nearly blew her stack at that one.

Then on Wednesday the article was handed out, along with a double-sided worksheet with quiz-like questions as well as inference questions and vocabulary words. In the silence, I created a worksheet for the next article, which was about the dearth of African-American blood donors for treating sickle-cell patients. I had wanted to do five questions that involved synthesis of various points in the whole article, as opposed to a paragraph-by-paragraph quiz, but Mrs. F convinced me that the students would object to having such "hard" questions so I broke them up into shorter, more individual ones.

Today my daughter was home sick so I spent most of the day working on my unit for Walter Dean Myers's 145th Street. Just as I discovered in my senior year at the High School for Performing Arts acting department that I prefer researching my character to actually rehearsing plays, I'm finding that I love designing units and thinking up activities for my students without having any idea to what extent I'm going to enjoy teaching them. What started out as just a general idea - "Hey, you're a New Yorker, why don't you do a PowerPoint on Harlem?" - has become pre-reading activities for both the book and the first story, a forest of pink and yellow sticky notes on the text of the first story, and the development of three possible final assessment projects to be completed in May. Love it!