Month: February 2019

Going to the VMFA and analyzing the art with “I see” and “I wonder” was a unique experience.  I am a 7 second window shopper with it comes to most historical art.  My art appreciation is geared towards science museums and photography exhibits.  Looking at the art as we’ve been taught definitely made me think and wonder about the objects.  I am still wondering if the statue of the man was made out of one piece of stone and what caused the marbling effect on that stone.  It amazes me the ancient civilizations had the ability to make such intricate art the stood the test of time.

I wonder how a young class would receive the virtual tour.  I had a difficult time answer the questions because I wasn’t really sure what was being asked.  Personally, I became a little disinterested about halfway through.  It was so much more engaging to see the actual pieces that we were observing.

I wonder how effective it would be to have the students create there own art representative of the time period/culture being studies.  I would be good prep work before visiting a museum.  There would have the added bonus of having the artist present to explain their creation and purpose and answer questions after the class is finished interpreting the piece.

Are there any programs that would bring relatively inexpensive replications of historical art into the classroom?

Worst case scenarios…

I have been wondering about how we, as new teachers,  are supposed to implement the teaching methods and assessment styles that we have learned in our classes into school systems that are unsupportive of change.  Say that the established teachers prefer to teach to the test.  They like their assessments that are geared towards Blooms Taxonomy Levels I/II and don’t want to put the effort into grading assignments that require thought and depth.  I suppose the best case scenario is that the school system allows you to teach your way as long as it doesn’t affect other teachers.  But as new teachers, where do we get the support we need?  There is no one with which to work on rubrics or assessments or plan quality lessons.  There is no group collaboration.

What if it is a school system where the lessons are synchronized across the specific grade level down to the minute?  There isn’t much room for real learning to happen.  How do you inspire students into taking an interest in the material?  If the kids don’t take a vested interest in what they are learning, they aren’t going to learn it.  They are going to memorize it during the crash review sessions directly before the SOLs and then forget it.  So, they might do well on the SOL.  But, it doesn’t give them the skills to be successful in life, such as critical thinking, comprehension, synthesizing information, expressing their ideas in various ways.

This is my mind because I want to find a way to get through to students that aren’t receptive to the traditional methods of teaching.  I want to use all of the great information that I am learning.  I don’t think I could stand teaching in a school system that is super strict with micromanaging.  It would be too painful to watch students struggle when there are so many quality resources that I could be utilized.  I want to see growth in my students by giving them higher-level thinking projects and complete formative assessments that are valued.  Knowledge tests have their place, but in the long run, it is so much more important to be able to think and apply your knowledge.

 

This last class has made me think more about front loading for reading.  I think it would have helped me a considerable amount in school.  My comprehension skills are low, even now.  It takes me more time to process the information and I find it difficult to answer questions directly after reading something.  It was interesting to work through a process to compensate for this problem.

I wasn’t sold on the vocabulary portion until the end of the activity.  If it had been me in school, I would have checked that I could use each word in a sentence.  However, while reading the document, those words popped out at me.  The tea party exercise (I would dub it Social Studies Social) was also and interesting activity.  I was very focused on hearing all of the sentences.  It also helped me pick out key information in the document.  I wonder how a student with social anxiety would react to that activity.

Everything we did before reading, benefited me while I was reading.  I was able to focus on meaning and wonder about the information that I was taking in.  I think looking at the words after reading, would help a student to visualize how much they learned in that activity.  I wonder where my comprehension would be if I had been taught this way.

The biggest take away I got from this class was how much information can accurately be deduced from a collection of primary resources.  It was awesome to retell key portions of Mr. Stohr’s life with the few sources that we had access to.  I was left wondering if someone could do that with what I’ve collected throughout my life.  Or, if I could find similar artifacts of my grandparent’s or great-grandparent’s that could help me understand their histories better.  What portions of our lives will be important enough to make it onto a site like ancestery.com to help our decedents learn who we are?

On that note, what will historians do in the future?  The world is going digital and that is going to completely alter how the past is researched and explored.  Online, everyone has their own opinion about everything.  How do you determine which opinions/recounts are worth further study or comparison?  What will be a be considered a primary source if electric documents can be altered or rewritten without indication?  What features of an electronic document would be analyzed?  It can’t be examined like the nuisances of a written letter or the material used to create.  Will future historian give up on searching though the ancient materials in favor of the easy access of what can be found on the internet?

I have so many questions.

I did enjoy this weeks video pertaining to show and tell.  It never occurred to me that this simple activity could become a competition between the haves and have-nots.  I think it’s a great idea to have theme-oriented show and tell.  It caps the options and it gives students, who do not know what to bring, a starting point.  It’s also a good activity to help students learn to present in front of a group of people.  The outline that the student’s used gave helped them to present the important information without the stories lasting forever.  I remember one show and tell in particular.  I believe it was 4th grade and I had just come home (Michigan) from a vacation to see me grandparents in Richmond.  While in Richmond, I saw this “gianormous” bee the size of my thumb.  A girl in my class disputed my claim that it was a bee, because there was no such thing as bees that size. Therefore, I was lying about all of it.   Many years later, I realize we were both right.  It was not a massively large bee.  But, I did see something.  It was a hornet and the size of my thumb, if not bigger at the time.