Counting Crows

Join Rudolf and Ferzine as they explore the outer limits of thought and imagination in the classroom!

[countingwhitecrows]

What a lovely idea! The possibilities of reworking these are endless...

[countingwhitecrows]

Making Room for Spontainety in our Lessons

I’m a rigidly compartmentalized person. This means that while I maybe a whirling dervish or a bag of giggles at home, none of that usually translates into my teacher-face, the one that I pull on when the morning bell goes off. The teacher - face is by no means, frightening or discouraging, on the contrary, it is a fine cross between Oswald the Octopus, and the kind of zen you can only find on Baby TV.

However, what comes with the teacher-face, is a briskness and a subtle impatience that comes with paying attention to fine details, wanting to achieve goals & obsessive planning. While I’m not advocating throwing the lesson-planning book out quite yet, I’ve come to realize that overdoing the planning and over-steering classroom time and discussion, in all our earnest zeal, can actually keep us from exploring new territory. Given time and space (both notoriously hard to find in schools in India), I’ve noticed that students often find interesting tangents of thought that merit our collective attention. The key here, is to let them.

Sitting back does not come easily to ‘good’, ‘involved’ teachers. It isn’t easy to hold ourselves back from 'explaining’ or diving in and solving conceptual riddles for them. Our students will only savour learning, when they co-create the and work hard at piecing together the information before them. Think the Socratic Method, but a hundred times messier, and way less individuated.

I used to begin creative writing classes with the line 'Go where the story takes you’.

Go where the lesson takes you.

[countingwhitecrows]

Thoughts on the Fish-eye Effect

Lately I’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking on what implications the fish-eye effect has on our classrooms. If you haven’t heard already, this effect identifies the tendency of a facilitator to frequently focus on a few gifted/disruptive students at the ‘expense’ of ignoring or neglecting a less vocal or better - behaved student.

We certainly tend to assume to a certain extent, that quieter students, who do reasonable well, are ‘okay’ and can 'take care of themselves’. Each classroom seems to have set expectations as to which group of students will answer, often over and over again, and which ones will generally not. The establishment of unspoken classroom norms like these have always fascinated me. What is more interesting, however, is how the teacher often subconsciously picks up on these norms and then proceeds to co-opt, reinforce, or play into them.

Quietness is no measure of classroom management. It is disconcerting to think about the possibility that relative quietness and consistent 'non - deviant’ behaviour may actually be symptomatic of something gone wrong, whether that something has to do with flawed teaching methodology that fails to take personality types into account or personal issues the student may silently be struggling with. Passive behaviour has to ring alarm bells in our head as much as attention - seeking. I’d like to think that a fair amount of disruptiveness and silliness goes with healthy adolescent development. As teachers, I think we ought to keep our eyes on 'nice kids’ as much as we pay attention to the others.

Acknowledging or paying attention to a quieter student who prefers to 'wallpaper’ comes less easily than paying attention to someone more outgoing or you tend to have more natural eye contact with. I am in no way suggesting, however, that it is somehow abnormal to be introverted. Introversion is something to be understood and respected. I am merely indicating that introverted students perhaps need our attention as well, perhaps in a more discreet, one on one manner, and not one that attempts to shame them or draws attention to them in ways that they’d be uncomfortable

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Good Morning, Ma'am!

'Good Morning, Ma'am!' The choir Bright, Hopeful, Wakes The Morning Up from It's slumber Beneath The Earth. Encore. -Ferzine

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Punishment Poetry

Within a couple of weeks of becoming a full - time teacher, my suspicions about ‘correctional measures’ (let’s just call it punishment, shall we? What with the conceptual wolves in sheepskin…) were confirmed- they were utterly futile, impedimental to learning AND teaching, and bounced off their backs like deflated ping pong balls.

That’s when I decided to punish with poetry.

Asking disruptive students to write ‘punishment’ poems had some obvious payoffs- the task kept them relatively 'busy’ and challenged, it introduced them to the pleasures and pains of doing something constructive and gave them something they could be proud of (in however odd and twisted ways). As a facilitator, it helped me connect with them through assistance, and gave me something to cherish and bling my fridge with.

For some of the senior students, the punishment poems were the first time they had tried their hand at poetry. I suspect, that in their case, the sheer amount of rigour that writing poetry demands was enough to turn them off 'deviance’ for a while.

There were of course, those oddball cases in which a few, unusually gifted students found the punishment too thrilling and maybe, even a bit addictive. I quickly resolved this paradox by including special challenges for them ( such as writing with the 5 senses, or writing with certain poetic devices or using a specific rhyme scheme).

Our school magazine is publishing the best of these poems this year.

This may sound strange, but children naturally love being challenged. They naturally love learning.

Let’s do our best to keep it that way.

Let’s make our classrooms fun places to hang out at.

[countingwhitecrows]

On The Politics of Humiliation in the Classroom

http://www.cultofpedagogy.com/joe-bastianich-teaching/ This article got me thinking about some teaching practices that commonly find their way into our classrooms, that I think we need to reflect on, as a community, with honesty and candour.

As adults, and as facilitators, we are undeniably in positions of power and privilege in the classroom, whether this power is social or epistemic in nature. This isn’t something that can be wished away by calling ourselves facilitators rather than ‘teachers’. The lived realities of the everyday classroom reveal stories of shaming, of ostracism and isolation, of neglect and what Gonzales, in another article calls 'micro-rejections’.

These manifest as dismissals, as pointed ignoring, as constant picking on in some spaces, while some classrooms may witness put downs or even the use of humour as humiliation. Humour is a powerful social tool, and is just as effective when used for all the wrong reasons.

Our classroom spaces need to be less about ourselves and more about the lessons at hand and how they relate to our students’ larger social context. We cannot do away with humiliation in the classroom unless we find a way to practise more self-reflexivity and mindfulness in the way we teach. This leaves us very vulnerable and open to…learning.

Guess we better go get started on that homework now.

[mickeykilloran]

Distract the Distractor: Stop Off-Task Behavior Without Drama

Lots of monster-size discipline problems start with a single off-task behavior. If you put a damper on those little behaviors, you'll stop a lot of big ones, too. [...]

[countingwhitecrows]

Yes. Yes. Yes.