Today’s Heroes

We had a bit of a tangential discussion in class yesterday centering on the question “Who are today’s heroes?”

The kids did not think athletes were role models. Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Shawne Merriman, Floyd Landis, Shawn Kemp, Tim Donaghy, the 2007 Boston Marathon, NASCAR fines for cheating are up, Gary Player said golfers are doping, and horse racing is again seeing illegal substances used. Even tennis isn’t immune:

“the ATP is investigating suspicious gambling activity around Nikolay Davydenko’s Aug. 2 match with Martin Vasallo Arguello after an online British gambling company received 10 times the normal wagers on the match.”

My students also said they can’t look up to corporations or politicians. They named Enron, Balco, the partisan firings of lawyers, the banking failures, Abu Ghraib, Valerie Plame, Ted Stevens, Jack Abramoff, Monica Lewinsky, and Halliburton. The kids saw the leaders of the country and its financial institutions as no better than anyone else.

Sadly, numerous students said their parents aren’t the role models they hoped for growing up either. My students were pretty open discussing how their parents over-drink, break (what they consider minor) laws, cheat on taxes, have affairs, and can’t maintain marriages.

After listening to them list all the reasons why these people could not be role models, they were hard-pressed to choose another group to whom they could look for guidance. The only groups the kids felt really comfortable mentioning as role models were local church leaders (even then with some reservations) and teachers (with some concerns here too).

Ultimately, the students decided they had to look to individuals to be role models; groups had too many variables and outliers.

If you had to pick a group to be role models for students, who would the group be? Is it possible to look to a group?

It’s amazing what kinds of discussions can come out of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.

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Update (3/1): Check out this article about the impact a role model can have.

Multi-tasking or Multi-distracted?

This week my students related to me how an assignment I designed to take 15 minutes took as long as 45-60 minutes. After some questions from me and responses from them, I discovered that most of my students (probably 75% of them) text, instant message, or use the internet while completing their homework. Of course, I said to them “no wonder it takes you so long. You’re distracted.” And of course, they tell me “we’re multi-tasking.”

Coincidentally, this month’s neatoday has an article all about multi-tasking focusing on three myths about multi-tasking. They are:

1. Multi-tasking saves time,
2. Mutli-tasked learning is as good as single-task learning, and
3. Multi-tasking [is the] forte of the young.

To me, these seemed obvious and common sense, but I guess not.

Last year when my students mentioned that multi-tasking and distractions are not a factor I had my students read “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. For those of you unfamiliar with this short story, it takes place in the future with attempts being made to make everyone equal by requiring “handicaps” be placed on those with advantages over others. For example, beautiful people have to wear items like masks and goofy noses making them less pretty while very strong people have to wear heavy bags of bird shot, and intelligent people have to wear devices making loud noises to interrupt their thoughts.

I then divided the class in half with one group reading out in the hallway and the other group staying in class to read. However, I prearranged to get a bit of help from my TA and my neighbor’s two TAs for a little experiment. Those in the hall read uninterrupted while my TAs had assigned duties: one had to bang on my table loudly five times every minute, one had to clap her hands three times every thirty seconds, and the last one had to ring a bell every forty seconds.

Of course, the students were quite surprised at first, then annoyed, and finally frustrated as the hallway group finished first, and I stopped everyone to take a quiz. I got all sorts of complaints about the distractions, so I stopped the conversation with one simple statement: “So you’re saying distractions make assignments take longer?” They then got the point about multi-tasking, and we didn’t take the quiz.

I can’t say for sure that I changed anyone’s habits, but I did make my point. Still, I didn’t get any more complaints about homework time and we read a great story, so I consider that in itself a victory even if a small one.

Conquered the Couch

Worked hard. Meeting went long. Came home. Slobbered by the dog. Cuddled by the cat. Watched Survivor. Going to bed.

Good night!

Student Journalism + Sex = Censorship

Student Journalism + Sex = Censorship. The formula holds true once again. Student journalists bring to light the relaxed morality of some students, and administrators want to restrict the free speech rights of the young. Despite the important information presented by the students, censorship rears its ugly head once more.

The Statesman, a Stevenson High School national award winning student newspaper, published a story about the “changing nature of dating encounters, explored the role of teen drinking and sex games, [and] explained chemical reactions in the brains of males vs. females” according to a Chicago Tribune article. Now a new policy has been created: “Starting with the next edition, the communication arts program director will review the stories after they’ve been approved by journalism adviser Barbara Thill.”

This reminds me of the story of the Jagwire here in my state of Washington. Apparently, when student journalists write stories about sex, district officials think censorship. However, parents are another matter entirely in the case of The Statesman:

The flap over the most recent Statesman drew a crowd of parents at last week’s school board meeting, but they weren’t there to complain about whether teen sex is newsworthy or whether the students had overstated things. They were worried about censorship…”I’m fully in support of any issue that gets the kids talking,” one parent said. Another suggested school officials “don’t want to look at what’s really going on in there.”

The parents understand the value of the student-journalism program, but the district leaders don’t agree and their votes tend to be the only ones that count. Seems as though the kids are on to something the adults don’t necessarily want to face.

I admit that lines can be crossed if students aren’t advised properly, but (again) this does not appear to be the case. The students presented a full spectrum of viewpoints and moved into the scientific realm. One commenter on the article, when refuting another commenter, stated that the notion “that the article itself was based on one student is blatantly wrong, there are multiple sources in BOLD. Also, the article was part of a package, which included other sources and viewpoints, including those of professional psychologists. There was ample research involved.”

The article’s author said this about the school district’s officials: “This isn’t about censorship, they insist. But there’s no other word for it.”

Summer Work

Today we discussed whether or not to continue requiring students to complete summer homework in order to enroll in the English honors programs. Originally, we asked students to read a biography (and compose a 1-2 page summary), to read a Newbery/Pulitzer winner, and to read three consecutive periodicals.

My beef was always that we received book reports on the biography, and we had no real way to know if the students actually did the other work. Besides this, the writing did not feel authentic while the reading did not connect to anything in the class.

However, today I think we made some progress. We’re keeping the readings but directing the writing much more; plus, we’re eliminating the periodical readings. The students will have to connect personally to the biography, and we’re going to have the students use the Newbery/Pulitzer reading as part of a presentation in the first week of school. We still need to finalize the writing prompts we will use, but I think we’re heading in the right direction if we’re going to assign summer work.

I try to have my students relate to the readings in their writing, and I believe we leave out the students’ experiences and connections to the literature much too often. How do students relate to the readings? Do the authors’ or subjects’ beliefs match those of our students? Why should students read these types of texts? What is learned from the texts? These are the types of questions I want my students to answer, and I think they become better writers for it.