First week with students

I am wondering what we will do and if we will try to do some of the same lessons. Last year Francis did the mandala and they were really nice. I've done the paragraph about coming back, a bag o'm thing with speech, and last year jumped in to a novel. What to try this year? In addition, I am fortunate to have 5 advanced classes. I need to turn up the heat the challenge from day 1.

Since I have only 1 ave. I can give away some of my Rev it Up books to Tricia. I need vocab for the adv.

why poetry is important

Wallace Stevens:

The poet's role is to help people live their lives.

I'm listening to Nancie Atwell explain why poetry is important



I'm sold.



ok, now back to "reality."
The poems in our literature book...... I love NONE of them. I like a few. I have hardly had any poetry in my classes for years, because I cannot find value in the material I already have, and I never sought other material that I could use legally in multiple copies.

Also I have been I think cowardly about poetry. To me, its value is that it is deep and serious and goes into controversial, highly personal areas. And I have imagined problems with that, which may never arise, but they have helped block me from this vast and powerful resource.

Does it sound like I'm moving towards making the effort to find better stuff? I think so.

I learned the word apodictic this afternoon.

I'm reading Joseph Campbell. I bump into this word: apodictic. I do not recognize the word; I observe the context, and it doesn't lead me to the specific meaning of the word.  I know that dict means word or say or judge/direct. It's the apo part that i don't know. APO.... what word(s) do I know that have that as a prefix?  can't think of any, so I have to go to the dictionary. I used M-W.com . Here's the screen print.

I started thinking about students memorizing and what was worth memorizing. Memorizing should contribute to something more significant than the things memorized. For example, memorizing prefixes should help me know more words than I knew without knowing those prefixes.

I observe that the root dict had no relation to the actual meaning of apodictic. I confess, I am so enamoured of etymologies and roots and prefixes and languages that I sometimes have hypotheses that collapse upon examination. But I have exhilarating mental exercise, no matter what.

Unsurprisingly I conclude that it is worth students' time and effort to learn prefixes. Then how do I assess this learning?  I have been reading and thinking about mastery.  So now I explore that.

Is 80% mastery? and what traditional letter grade should I assign that 80% to? my gut tells me B, with 90% being an A.

But if the material is essential, and I want my students to achieve mastery, then nothing short of that should be "gradeable." C and D will not have a part of this essential* learning.

... which leads me to think about re-testing, re-assessing (with conditions) until mastery. Until my student achieves mastery, I assign no official letter grade. I break the massive quantity of prefixes and roots into 5 sections, roughly one section per grading period. If a student declines to achieve mastery of any one section, the student fails that section and the official letter grade is an F.  At this point, I am thinking of advanced classes. Regular classes have Rev it up, which I am very happy with.

back to Joseph Campbell and things that relate to necessary truth or absolute certainty.


* It's essential because I say it's essential.