Monday, June 8 - Friday, June 12
Friday
Today we started with a discussion of a quote from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media philosopher: We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we walk backwards into the future. We then watched the first half of the film Memento.
Thursday
Once the journals were done, we listened to two more debates today. I discussed the possibility of doing a film study for the remaining classes and showed the trailer for The Crucible. Unfortunately, half a dozen of you have already seen it, so I will see what else I can come up with.
Wednesday
I was time for debating today. We listened to two debates. I am looking forward to hearing the rest tomorrow!
Tuesday
I was away today unexpectedly. As a result, I asked that the TOC give the class a debating task to do as I had that already prepared. I thought it would complement yesterday's conversations suitably! Below are the notes I left for my replacement.
Monday
Today we started with a discussion of a quote from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media philosopher: We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we walk backwards into the future. We then watched the first half of the film Memento.
Thursday
Once the journals were done, we listened to two more debates today. I discussed the possibility of doing a film study for the remaining classes and showed the trailer for The Crucible. Unfortunately, half a dozen of you have already seen it, so I will see what else I can come up with.
Wednesday
I was time for debating today. We listened to two debates. I am looking forward to hearing the rest tomorrow!
Tuesday
Please be advised that a novel autograph (about the non-fiction book from this term) will be due on Friday, June 12. This will be the last opportunity to hand in any late work from term 4 before report cards.
Debate preparation
Ask students to get themselves into groups of 4 – two people
will be the affirmative/proposition group – two will be the opposition.
Only if absolutely necessary, so as not to leave a student
out, can there be one team of 3 versus 3, or 3 vs 2 for the entire class.
Have students draw the topics from a container. They can
then negotiate who gets + and who gets - .
Using the NetBooks and the debating packages, the students
should separate into 2s and prepare their debates for next class.
In response to a couple of student requests to deal with communication and allow some talk time during class in place of silent reading, we tried a "conversation café" today. We began with an article about Taylor Baldry's experiment with offering free conversations in a park. Next we took a look at his web site to gather some tips for conversing.
For the café, the colour of your conversation menu indicated who your partner would be. As I watched everyone settle into the conversations, it was gratifying to see smiles, plenty of signs of engagement in the conversations and no lulls. Only one group struggled with their conversation, but eventually managed to restart on their own. The emoticon feedback that you provided to me, suggested this was a positive experience and we may try it again - with different menus.
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