What It Takes to Win

Learning as tactical advantage
(photo credit)

Like at all schools in the district I believe, my high school uses Aeríes to management its student data. When I first heard the name of this student information system (SIS), I thought that for some reason my teacher had mentioned the Roman god of war (I’m still a little unclear why the database was named after a bird of prey, which is only a little better than a god of prey). But the misconception stuck because in fact there has been something elusively militant about each of the instances that I have looked up a particular student in this database: either I’m wondering about previous behavior interventions, or about how far their test scores have fallen, or whether they are SED (socio-economically disadvantaged), or whether they live at an address requiring them to take a long bus ride to school, or whether their parents both work, and where, and did they graduate from high school, or whether an AP has entered counseling notes, or really any reason that students might have a violent reaction against short blond English teachers or short blond teachers’ content delivery or classroom management. Aeríes gives me nearly endless ammunition to use in my battle to understand my students and their performance, whether they like it or not.

Do I sound a little reluctant? Yet acrimonious? Until this week I would have continued to grit myself against using the system and used it anyway.

But this week Aeríes helped me to deflect the nearest miss to my teacherly identity yet. When a conflict with a student mushroomed from a verbal tiff during class to a walking away from me after class to a third-hand report from the student’s case manager to a spectacular personal insult (as spectacular as an insult can be coming from a high school freshman), I armed for battle. Not to understand the student, but to understand her documented identity. All of those elements listed above—where she’s been and what conflicts she’s been in before and how they were handled—any hint or whiff of why she and I ended up in a clash and how I might possibly find some—any—point of mutual contact with her—all of those elements were available to me through Aeríes within five minutes.
External conflict with this student hasn’t been resolved, but my own internal conflict has. And now I’m conflicted about that.Being able to learn about a person—even a student, whom sometimes we forget are people too—from a distance with limited firsthand conversation gives one a sense of power. And teachers need power. In order to manage the classroom education of dozens or hundreds of power, we need power. Informational power.But the more I know about my students from records and documents and cum files, the more the power of their identity becomes shared between them and me. They may not like it or they might not even know about it, but I have a say in their identity because I have a say in the way their identity is documented.

All I know at this point is that I want a truce. I want my students to have much of a say as possible in who they want themselves to be and how that information is stored and communicated and passed along to the next people in their lives who facilitate their learning. If there’s any hope for armistice, students need to own their identity more than I do.

Appfinity

Technology as excited learning

For the last three weeks in my freshman high school classroom, life has been sans Apple TV. And it makes me sad. Weeping, wailing, gnashing on the inside kind of sad. The girl who professed eternal fidelity to the outgoing doc cam is now reconsidering her pledge. Doc cams, sure, enable the instructor or a volunteering student to mark the text or write margin notes on a piece of paper so that the rest of the class can observe and depending on the day either copy or critique. A teacher can make double or triple emphasis on a portion of a textbook or handout by placing it under the camera, then adjusting the focus and light and position and swallowing back a more forceful reaction at the sight of a two-foot version of her hand projected on the whiteboard (why didn't I repaint my nails last night?) as students either watch the board alone or attempt a here-then-there glancing between their own text and the image.


But with Apple TV it's all different. You know what you can use on those screens? Apps. Loads of 'em. Here are three that I'm especially pining (and currently unable) to try in my classroom.


Rory's Story Cubes.

This app is freshmen friendly because of its game-like appearance anchored with a more teacher-satisfied interface between image and word. Students think that they are playing a game in which they roll virtual dice that give them a series of images (stars, planes, crossroads, parachute), but the wily instructor knows that these innocuous pictures provide an especially fun, once a week warm up that nudges students to make connections between what they imagine in one medium (picture) with what resources they have in another (word). And the genre is completely up to the teacher! Will students be asked to write a story based on the images—or a poem? a summary of a recently read text? The options are endless.


Cultiwords.

This app is all about how the teacher uses it. One part SAT vocabulary study and one part Friday night word game, I envision this app being used slightly less frequently than the story cubes just to make sure that it doesn't begin to feel like sugar-coated discouragement. The words in the app are difficult (unctuous, cajole, anecdote), but the savvy instructor can create a team-powered game in which students aren't left to their individual funds of knowledge to construct their best or most educated guesses about meanings. Why not use this vocab to craft a word wall in the classroom so that students get even more familiar with the advanced words? Most creative use of a Cultiword in a paper or other assignment gets their name on the word wall alongside the word made that much more accessible to themselves and their classmates.


OmniGraffle.

This is my favorite. Pictures, stories, and competitive vocabulary are all good and well, but organization? That's where it's at for this English teacher. OmniGraffle touts itself as keeping content "gorgeously understandable." Swoon. It doesn't get much better than getting students excited about owning the content we want them to organize in a properly academic and logical fashion. The app allows for multiple visual work boards, from old timey parchment to colorful interconnected bubbles and everything in between. This is also a painfully expensive purchase so unlike with the other two apps, this one would be a whole-class purchase only. I can see myself using this app to facilitate a class discussion on how best to organize a text's plot; how academic and content words are etymologically related; how to construct an effective argument for a paper; and everything (and I mean everything) else in the world. I seriously believe this app could be a major step toward turning freshmen into compulsive organizers.


Now, about getting that Apple TV back in my classroom...