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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Second Session

I have a new and smaller group of kids this session. Hopefully, I have enough to keep the class going. They are definitely a less talkative bunch. Some people might see this as a good thing, but I find it relatively boring. They don't have any opinions. My teaching style is base on challenging preconcieved notions, but if student doesn't have any this is rather difficult. I am always leary of creating the notions because I do not want to create intellectual clones of myself. Though this would insure them of great success and popularity I feel it would ultimately be detrimental to their cognitive growth.

I have been giving them questions to answer on the blog in hopes of stimulating a decent response. This week I have them analyzing the difference between boring and fun text. Why are some works easy to read and others are not. I am hoping that they talk about vocabulary, sentence structure, interest, and prior knowledge (schema). I also ask them to make these same connections with other media. We can then springboard into how to be "media literate." This afternoon we will be watching Whale Rider. I will attempt to teach them how to read a movie covering the basic such as establishing shot, and camera angles.

As for the blogs, I have decided that when I do this during the regular school year I will make a directory of the blogs so that students, teachers, and parents can access the students' comments and reply to them. My dream of a Utopian educational community is surfacing again.

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