Photo by Gil Epshtein

And I’m not talking about the complexity of the exams. I didn’t have time to look at them!

Every national exam day is a busy one for me. As a national counselor of English for deaf and hard of hearing students, on the day of the exam itself (and the days preceding the exam)I respond to a large number of questions from schools who have only one such student. They generally need clarifications regarding the paperwork that needs to be stapled to our students’ exams.

At my school we, of course, know what must be stapled where but we have volume! About 30 of our 62 students took the exams, some took more than one. There is the usual round of minor crises to be solved – students who don’t bring their pens or dictionaries, students who come slightly late or arranged to be picked up an hour before the test ends, the usual.

This year, on top of that, all hell broke loose.

We have two students with issues related to anger management (a trigger will cause them to move from being sweet to “Hulk-like” at an amazing speed).

The exams are given in three sessions. During the second session one of these students (we’ll call him L) was taking an exam. The other students (we’ll call him A), along with a few other kids who had taken the first session of the exam and were waiting for the third session, camped out in an empty classroom. I wasn’t aware of this.

This empty classroom was the one adjoining the exam room. Worse, the wall separating the rooms was a dry wall (made of plaster).

It would have gone unnoticed if they had sat quietly and used sign language. But it seems that someone pulled “A”‘s arm and his watch fell off and the metal strap separated into sections. That did it. “A” started pounding the wall with his fists and screaming.

“L” is hard of hearing and he certainly heard THAT. When I came to see what was going on “L” was already getting worked up and making threats

Now, if you were under any illusion that I’m the kind of special-ed teacher that soothes the outbursts of the angry student, then now is the time to get rid of that thought. I can help them find the ways that will enable them to study English. But when a 6 foot 19 year old is enraged I call for help. Other staff members got him out into the yard, fixed his watch strap and calmed him down.

In fact he calmed down so completely that less than an hour and a half later he took his exam. “L” was supposed to be in the same room for his last exam but I moved him into another room with students taking a totally different level of exam – did not want them in the same room! That caused a bit of technical confusion but nobody disagreed with my decision!

Some exam days have gone by so smoothly that I go to gym class afterwards. Yesterday was not one of them!

But it’s over now. And I must tell you, these kids are NOT usually (except for certain days!) the ones I would call my most difficult students.

But this post is long enough and I have written a post entitled “Will the REAL Difficult Student Please Stand Up” over at the iTDi blog (as part of a focus on working with difficult students) so I’ll be off to bed now! Good night!

“Where the Wild Things Are” most certainly stands on its own. I’ve met people who aren’t interested in children’s literature in the slightest, who may never have heard of Sendak, immediatly react to the name of the books. I encounter the book EVERYWHERE, in its Hebrew translation that is. By the way, the title in Hebrew is “In the Land of Wild Creatures”.

However, reading about Sendak in the New York Times article DID explain a few things. In particular, the part about how the abduction of the Lindbergh baby influenced him.

In short, Maurice Sendak has left a significant legacy. May his memory be blessed!

Photo by Omri Epstein

This is the first of my new batch of exercises as part of my Reading Pictures Strategy for  improving the reading comprehension skills of struggling learners.

What is different about this new batch is that I’ve placed more emphasis on the HOTS (higher order thinking skills) which is now a major issue in high-schools.

I’ve added a category and a tag called “HOTS” to make these exercises easy to locate. In addition, they can also be downloaded from the blog page titled “Downloadable Goodies!”

The Simon’s Cat short videos are perfect for discussing the skill of “identifying patterns of behavior”. This cat most certainly exhibits clear patterns of behavior!

Here is the worksheet. You are welcome to adapt it to suit your needs. I would be delighted to hear what you do with it!

Simon’s Cat

I read “The Hobbit” and the trilogy when I was a teenager. I also read many other fantasy books and some science fiction too, then and in the following years. The “Narnia” series, “A Never Ending Story” and “A Wrinkle in Time” are the examples which pop up first.

I accompanied my boys as they discovered the world of fantasy and learned from them about some books that hadn’t been around when I was their age. Books such as the “Artemis Fowl” series and “Good Omens“.

It didn’t seem to me that age was a problem when it came to enjoying fantasy.

However, tonight I felt less sure. Though it must be noted that I was watching the movie again, not rereading the book.

The third film includes the happy end. You see Aragorn being crowned and everyone is in white and all is splendid, beautiful and shiny.

That bothered me.

Of course they are happy. But they’ve just been through an incredibly horrific war with lots of dead and wounded, and great devastation. They couldn’t possibly be looking like that after what they’ve just been through, even though they are happy.

I’m being ridiculous, right? The tale is full of magic, so what’s my problem?! I didn’t have a “reality check” for the previous parts of the film but the ending bothered me.

I didn’t react this way before. Is this a sign of age? Is it harder to surrender to fantasy when you get older? I hope not…

By Gil Epshtein

So much so that here I am, writing about it. In particular, I need to expand on this quote:

“Don’t assume you know my kids as well as I do. That little boy with his back to me? Yeah, I know he’s off-task, but six months ago he would’ve thrown a desk when he was angry. Now he just turns his back. If I leave him alone, he’ll calm down and eventually apologize. If I say something to him now he’ll explode.”

In my class it wouldn’t be a little boy. It would be a teenage girl who is engrossed in cutting off threads coming out of her cloth pencil case. She can’t focus on anything else until the offending threads have been dealt with. Once she’s done she’ll work quickly and nicely. However,  if I try to stop her now we may end up in the principal’s office. Or it would be the huge teenage boy who says swear words to himself as he works. That’s significant progress – he used to swear at other students and get into fights which lead to trouble. As long as he does it quietly with his head down I’m thankful my students don’t hear well and ignore the behavior.

The problem lies with “the other” people. As opposed to “Teach from the Heart”, I don’t get officialy evaluated. At all! However, that doesn’t mean I’m not being judged.

First of all, there are the young teacher’s aids which I have for part of the lessons. I’ve had cases where I had to talk to them several times so that they wouldn’t loudly draw attention to a child off-task during the lesson. It is sometimes difficult for them to understand how a teacher could not expect everyone to behave like little angels and ignore some things!

Then there are the students themselves. Particularly 10th graders, which are new to the high-school. As I teach mixed classes (all 3 grades together) there’s always at least one student who takes it upon himself / herself to monitor what everyone else is doing and report it to me, loudly. And since that means that student isn’t working, he or she is so indignant that I’ve ignored a behavior the teacher from last year would never have ignored… now, of course, I can’t pretend not to notice and have to diffuse a situation that could easily escalate when it could have simply  been avoided!

Anyway, when you visit my class, which I hope you do, remember that there is a reason for everything, which I”ll be happy to exlain after the class!

I really recommend reading the full “Evaluate Me, Please” post.

This time the topic is “staying motivated and healthy”. That’s a topic very much on my mind. Finding the balance between doing the things to keep in the classroom for another 10 years at least (after 26!) while doing things unrelated to work is so tricky!

Lots to read there – check it out!

This author is an expert at quickly drawing the reader into the story. You begin with an aging film director, who was invited to Santiago de compostela (Spain) for a retrospection of his films, studying the painting in his room. Before you know it you realize there is a connection between the old city, the world of cinema, the painting and, of course, the hero’s life.

All that’s left is to find time to read, relax and see how it all unfolds!

Photo by Iddo Epstein

References to TED Talks come up over and over again when ELT teachers interact, whether online or at conferences. Without having conducted a proper poll, it seems to me that teachers watch talks on a wide variety of topics and do not limit themselves to those directly related to education.

This brought me back to Bill Ferriter’s post on The Tempered Radical blog: “Are YOU Intentionally Creating a TED in Your Head?”

Am I?

Bill Ferriter writes:

“…when we are building our own learning networks using social tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we need to intentionally reach beyond the thinking of leading educators.”

The way I understood his post is that paying attention to people from outside your field is good for you. Really good for you. Social media makes these people available.

So what about the TED in MY head?

For starters, I follow The Tempered Radical blog. While Ferriter is most certainly an educator, he’s not an English language teacher. He posts about many issues that on the surface aren’t relevant to me as a teacher, such as the problems of the American Education System, which I am not a part of. Yet his blog is fascinating and thought provoking.

Then there are two blogs I follow who actually are written by language teachers but teaching English / Spanish isn’t the focus of their blogs. “Humbly Human” and “Be the Change” are blogs that inspire, blogs that remind me to smile. The only problem is that they haven’t been posting recently – where have you gone, you two lovely ladies?

And that’s it.

All the many blogs I follow are closely related to ELT. While it’s true that sometimes I will find a recipe for a carrot cake or poem spreading its wings for the first time on some of these blogs, they are blogs focused on teaching English as a foreign language.

Theoretically, I could subscribe to the blogs of some of the authors I post about every Saturday. Some of the writers I enjoy so much in the New Yorker magazine have blogs too.

Except that I can’t.

Those of you whose blogs I follow know that I’m a dedicated follower. If I tweet about a post that means I have read it. I’m blessed with a diverse PLN that has a lot to give.

Oh, and I work too.

Listening / watching TED talks is not something I do on a daily basis. The TED in MY head will also have to mainly remain a thing that happens occasionally when the time is right to follow a link and read a different kind of post entirely. That does happen and it’s great when it does.

Are YOU creating a TED in YOUR head?

]]> http://visualisingideas.edublogs.org/2012/04/26/comment-on-are-you-intentionally-creating-a-ted-in-your-head/feed/ 2 http://visualisingideas.edublogs.org/2012/04/21/its-saturday-dr-seuss-and-burning-man/ http://visualisingideas.edublogs.org/2012/04/21/its-saturday-dr-seuss-and-burning-man/#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:49:12 +0000 Naomi Epstein http://visualisingideas.edublogs.org/?p=907 “Oh the Places You’ll Go” is one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books.

While officially a writer of children’s books this book seems to be SO popular with adults that I really am curious as to how children rate it among the Dr. Seuss books.

This version, from “The Burning Man” festival gives the beloved words a great twist!

ENJOY!!!

Photo by Iddo Epstein

I find it fascinating to follow Chia Suan Chong’s detailed descriptions of her “unplugged” lessons during this “Dogme Teach Off” challenge that she is taking. Chia describes her impressive lessons in such a way (including pictures of the white board and a sense of humor!) that it is the next best thing to being a fly on the wall in her classroom.

Now that we are up to day 6, I’ve begun wondering.

Remember “The Boat Paradox”? How many parts of a boat can be replaced and one can still call it the same boat?

If I take these lessons as a sample of how a series of Dogme lessons should unfold, which elements can I change and to which extent (still keeping a skilled teacher like Chia, of course!) while expecting a reasonable degree of success?

Chia is teaching quite a small class. I wonder, would these lessons would work as well with 18, 25 or 40 students? 40 students is not a hypothetical number, my colleagues in “regular” classes have 40 students!

Now, let’s imagine that the students were all teenagers who lived close to each other and have gone to school together for years. I have tried isolated Dogme lessons myself and found that my teenagers reacted well to them. However, it would seem to me that some elements of Chia’s lessons would be problematic (or would at least be treading on treacherous waters). Teens are sensitive and very concerned with what their peers think of them. Asking a simple question about their weekend activities could be a very hard point to expand on. Particularly when you have students from very different socio-economic levels in the class. Some students might say they slept and played on the computer. Some might relate great activities they went on with their families while others flatly refuse to cooperate with the lesson as it reminds them of the glaring difference between those lucky kids to what happens in their own homes. It seems to me that the lessons such as Chia has been teaching could work well with teens with the addition of an imaginative component such as “tell the class about a great weekend you would like to have”, but I would really like to hear from someone who has taught unplugged with teens.

Taking this further, what if Chia was teaching 8 year olds? They certainly love to talk about themselves! Obviously the topics that would come up would be different, but can you sustain a series of unplugged activities at this age?

I could go on, but the point is that I’m asking these questions because I really DO want the boat to be recognizable as the same boat!