Throwback Thursday…. Way Way Back

“Today is throwback Thursday.” one of the eighth graders told me this morning. More so than they knew. I, only half joking, told my seventh and eighth grade classes that today they would get the most important, life changing assignment I would ever give them. I then directed them to my class blog  and they proceeded to go back in time, twice; first to my past then to the 1840’s.

To any parents of PUCS middle schoolers who are reading this – Based on in class evidence many of them seem to be hooked. I sincerely apologize…and you’re welcome.

If you’d like to see the assignment click the link below.

Travel the Trail?

The Christmas Celebrations have Begun

Today the entirety of PUCS took part in a traditional Mexican Christmas celebration involving a procession, songs, dancing, and general folderol. The middle schoolers, who have done this before, pretended to remember how everything is supposed to run and are were in charge of herding groups of smaller children from classroom to classroom and then into the gym. Mrs. Matos attempted to be five places at once so she could oversee the middle school students. Once in the gym the student body proceeded to dance, hit pinatas, sing, and eat tacos more or less simultaneously. Meanwhile the rest of the staff milled about wearing the mildly perplexed look that teachers get this time of year. I took pictures.

 

Sometimes…

Sometimes when you ask for a creative project on the death of a famous British General during the French and Indian War you really have no idea what you’re going to get. Sometimes you get an interpretive dance routine backed by very old (late 1600’s) ballad.

I apologize for starting the video late and the bad camera work. I was trying not to laugh.

Enjoy

Rise of the Machines

 

It may not look like much at this point but the photograph above is the beginning of the end for humanity  an interesting new class at PUCS. The students you see have spent several after school sessions during the past weeks constructing VEX IQ robots  in preparation for a class on robotics that will be taught by a megalomaniac Mr. Stehower. The class will begin in two weeks and is only possible because of a partnership with malicious alien androids bent on world dominion Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department. I’ve been told that the finished robots will have color recognition capabilities, sonar, gyroscopic balance sensors, and laser beams that can melt steel at 50 yards. They will also be 50 feet tall. Students will be able to control, customize, and track the progress of their robots as they preform various tasks. Despite some early computer issues the construction of the robots is proceeding on schedule so get ready to acknowledge the new robot overlords  hear all about robotics from the PUCS students you know.

Breaking All the Rules

 

I meant to post this last Friday, but in the middle of the day our supply of internet ran out. However, I can pretty much guarantee its worth the wait.

In the process of learning about ancient Israel the middle school history classes had to listen to me drone on about the cultural importance of the ten commandments to western society.  I also let them know in no uncertain terms that they would be required to memorize the ten commandments. They let me know that there were words for people like me. I assume they meant words like ‘devilishly handsome‘ and ‘too clever for my own good‘.  They didn’t seem to find that funny.

In order to broker peace and surreptitiously give them a memory aid I told them to … break the ten commandments.  Allow me to hastily explain why I told sizable groups of teenagers to break what is quite possibly the oldest and most prevalent moral and ethical code in the western world. As well as a memory aid this ‘activity’ made a great intro into the effects of ancient Judaism. In addition to all of this it was really really funny to watch. Rest assured that the students who participated were extremely well behaved…or as well behaved as can be expected while violating basic principles of morality.  But don’t take my word for it watch the videos below and see if you can determine which commandment is being broken.

I apologize in advance for the sound quality. It was recorded via an ipod for no good reason at all.

Check out the accents they come up with.

Quinny-boy and Julikins?

This seems disturbingly fervent…

One question: What kind of car is that?

Here are some more for which I have no words…

Busy Day

Sometimes there is just a lot going on around here.

There are currently a bevy of parent volunteers in the building for Art Expression Day. This is the annual day during which elementary students are scattered all over the building painting, building things out of vegetables, and making granola bars.  (I can vouch for the granola bars their good – a little crumbly but good). This is all very educational…No really, it is.

All the teachers are a little punchy because of the changes to the schedule and because well, its Friday.

While that is going on upstairs the middle school had another cooking class today led by Eduardo Matos. I didn’t even have time to ask what they were making, but it smelled fishy.

The 6th graders finished up an interesting but very odorous science experiment that involved colored eggs, nearly a gallon of vinegar, some corn syrup, and spoiled milk.

The 7th graders are feverishly making plans to bury things in the back yard and I was running around like a madman trying to find a shovel this morning (For some reason there was one in boiler room) before we decided to hold off on the burial until next week.

Because of these events about four people were looking for the schools digital camera none of whom could find it because it was laying on my desk.

Meanwhile it is also pizza day. Have you ever seen a troupe of 4th and 5th grade students waiting in orderly quiet lines for pizza? … Neither has anyone else.

Eggs with their shells dissolved and only the inner membrane holding them together will take on the color and other properties of liquids they are placed in. The closest was left in Diet Coke.

Eggs left in corn syrup will lose water due to osmosis

Left over granola bars. I think they’re all gone by now.

Art Expression Day

Insightful?

I give the middle school boys a lot of flak for… just about everything. Being late, asking repetitive questions, failing to exercise common sense, failing to exercise common hygiene, moving their mouths faster than they move their brains, and jumping out of bushes at people, just to name a few. However, there are surreal moments when they have flashes of insight…or something very close to it.

 

Let me set the stage a bit. In history class we’ve been talking at length about early societies and the hallmarks of civilizations. All civilizations have certain basics in common; a system of writing, divisions of labor, surplus food etc. The kids in my class have basically been accepting of all this. Although I think I stretched their brains a bit when I claimed that everything they know as ‘civilized’ is the result of agriculture. I’m moving through this material quickly because, to be honest, studying Sumer and Egypt is much more…lively (more on that later). I do get a bit excited about agriculture but that’s just because I grew up in the middle of nowhere full of small farmers who had nothing better to do than be literal and figurative touchstone for a society that has no idea they exist. But I digress.

One of the requirements of civilization following a division of labor is a government of some sort. My classes briefly talked about what the first governments might have looked like, and I was prepared to move on when a hand went up. I almost ignored the hand, which happened to be attached to a 6th grader in the back row. Fairly often I call on one of the boys who has raised their hand for the sole purpose of asking me what type of cheese I favor as a hair treatment or something equally inane. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for my tendency to ignore the questions of adolescent male minds in my class. One can only take so many questions about cheese and bodily functions (sometimes in the same question). But I digress.

I did (eventually) call on the 6th grade boy, who had kept his hand up for several minutes. This is a good tactic for teachers; If questions or comments are forgotten or dropped after being ignored for more than a few minutes they were probably not worth answering in the first place. Cheese questions are amusing but soon fade. This question had endured, however, and when given the chance to speak I realized why. “Mr. Wilson? Government is a necessary part of civilization? What does that mean about our government?” At first I didn’t quite see what he meant and started to explain that our government serves the functions of all governments. And I began to list off what those some of the functions are but realized mid-sentence that our federal government wasn’t doing those things at the moment. That was the point of his question all along. Realizing that I told him that, yes, part of our government was ‘shutdown’ but other parts definitely continued to play their role and we have local and state governments that are operating like usual.  Still the question was apt and timely and persistent. What does it say about the state of our civilization that we voluntarily undid a part (small or large) of what makes up our civilization?

I thought I’d take a line or two to inform you all that the Library of Congress website is back up and running. You probably didn’t notice, but the first two days of the shutdown saw the LOC website disabled. I use that resource a lot at times throughout the year and I’m glad to see it accessible again. Through some miracle of bureaucracy the website is back but the Library of Congress buildings are still closed. The library is the single biggest public repository of knowledge and civilization in the world. Closing it is worrisome. But I digress…

 

 

Tools of the Trade

Tradesmen all have sets of tools and equipment they need to preform their job. Carpenters have various saws, chisels, and hammers. Doctors use a stethoscope and x-ray machines. Dentists have those tiny ice-pick scraper things and fear. Most people would be tempted to assume that teachers use chalkboards and textbooks pretty exclusively, and to be honest those things do see frequent use even in these days of LCD projectors, SmartBoards, and schools that give two ipads to every kindergartner.

Let me, however, highlight two items used to great effect in my class this week. They are old technology but less well known than chalkboards.

Crowbar and Microscope

Microscopes

Have you ever looked one of the hairs from your head? I mean really looked? The sixth grade science class has. They made their own wet-mount slides to examine hairs, pencil marks, and ink blots. For a brief period between their ad nauseum discussion of English Premier League Soccer* even the boys slowed down long enough to remark, “Hey, that’s awesome.” and become entranced by a view of their own hair magnified 40 – 100 times. Our classroom microscopes are basically a snazzed up version of what Robert Hooke was using in the 1600’s when he discovered cells.  Nonetheless, these little microscopes can change the way you look at the world around you. Now that the sixth graders know how to use them I have lots of things that might be interesting to examine.

 

Crowbar

What I really wanted was a hammer… but I often have to make due with the tools laying around on the shelves in the backroom of the office. Don’t ask me why Mrs. Drudy has a crow bar back there. I’m sure there’s a perfectly normal and not at all worrisome explanation. I’m just glad I could use it to smash a plastic bag full of pottery. It was the most therapeutic thing I’ve done in months.  Beyond that benefit however, smashed potsherds are perfect for teaching seventh and eighth grade students about the difficult work involved in archaeology. Groups of students were tasked to put the obliterated pieces back together and make some sense out them by writing an explanatory note giving educated guessed on what the object was and how it was used. The results, although they may not be completely finished, look like normal plates. mugs, and what seem to be tiny malformed leprechaun cereal bowls.

 

“Archaeology is like putting together a puzzle when you don’t have the box to look at, and most of the pieces are missing… and someone put a lot of pieces to a different puzzle in with yours.”

7th Grade beginning to piece things together.

 

*I am indebted to Miss. Fuller for explaining to me what the 6th grade boys were constantly jabbering about. To my ears it just sounded like they were making references to some obscure foreign pastime with absurd and overly complicated rules and has no reasonable equivalent in the United States….oh…wait…

“Questions? Comments? Charges of Heresy?”

If we’re to study Ancient History, which is the curriculum for middle school this year, then we have to go back as far as we can. To get as ancient as possible we have to go back to the beginning. But the deep past holds lots of unknowns and disputes with very little evidence to go on. The following is a partial explanation of some of the controversial things you might have heard if you talked to a PUCS middle schooler this week.

 

Some of you may have heard that I often end my class discussions with the phrase found in the title of this blog post, “Questions? Comments? Charges of Heresy?” There is a reason.  I often say heretical things. I mean, with all the different flavors of Christianity out there its possible to be declared a heretic for preferring worship music to hymns, cross to crucifix, or vanilla to chocolate. But going beyond all the petty little things that Christians argue over I routinely question basic tenets of faith, and I feel it only right to give the students the opportunity to call me on it. Some do, but they have yet to convene a church council, excommunicate, or burn me at the stake.

This week I told the seventh and eighth grade classes that it was their turn to throw the heavy rocks. By that I meant that this was their year for me to hand them some difficult questions that they’d have to deal with on their own. The first of these was a question directing them to wrestle with what we mean by ‘truth’. Now, I’m not a postmodernist (except on every second Thursday) but there are benefits to realizing the limited nature to which we can positively ‘know’ things. The first way we applied this question about truth was to myths from around the world. There are details in them we find absurd, but does that mean they contain no truth? By design this question led into a discussion about the book of Genesis. Then the class had to pick up some really heavy mental rocks: How are the stories of Genesis and the creation myths similar? What do we mean when we call those Bible stories true? Do some of the stories in Genesis count as myths?…

 Heresy number one: Casting Doubt on the Inerrancy of Scripture.  

Following up on that the classes also brought up the problem of evil and found that this weighty question had to be dealt with: If God is good and all-powerful and all-knowing why do bad things happen, and what does that say about our ability to make choices?…

Heresy number two (sort of a three-in-one): Doubting the goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence of God.  

Before any of you (or all of you) reading this send me angry and unpleasant messages let me briefly defend my actions. I was once told by a presenter in a training for Christian educators that “You can’t send kids into the woods.” which was his analogy for saying we shouldn’t expose kids to dangerous belief systems and contrary worldviews. I couldn’t disagree more. Students need the exposure. Perhaps students at a Christian school need it more than others as they are more at risk of not seeing beyond the walls of the little Christian garden we’ve put them in. To be sure, I’d be mistaken in doing this too early so I refrain from having most of these conversations with the sixth grade. They’re going to go into the woods sometime, however, and its much better that they go the first few miles with someone who has been there before. Very soon they’ll end up on their own one way or another.

I play devil’s advocate really really well during these discussions. I persuade and question and frustrate them. I’m not about to give them paper tigers to knock down when I’ve seen the real ones that they’ll have to face later.

I hope by enabling/forcing the students at PUCS to deal with hard questions of faith and philosophy and science  without being either terrified or complacent that I just might be making their futures more thoughtful, less full of harsh surprises, less reactionary, and perhaps a bit more sane. I think that might be the only hope we have of a more tolerant, kinder, faithful world.  We might even be putting ourselves on the road to avoiding the protestant scourge of the ever dividing denominations if we could just get people to quit splitting churches over the spelling of ‘hallelujah‘.

Superheroes and World Domination

Today is the kickoff of the elementary school’s heroes unit. You might ask “What one does do to initiate such a unit.” The answer, of course, is hold a SUPERHERO TRAINING DAY! With capes whirling and masks obscuring their identity the elementary students filed into the gym where they… Well I don’t know what they did. No cameras are permitted inside SUPERHERO TRAINING DAY!   I can only assume they learned to melt steel with their laser-vision, carry a belt full of gadgets, make witty one liners, create exuberant amounts of collateral damage to public property, and avoid their secret weaknesses. It seems that taking a course in outrageous costumes was a prerequisite.

Some of those in attendance were:

Lady Grey

W Girl

Captain Cool

The Green Gecko

Miss Terious

 

 

 

 

But wait! Villany is a foot. Our aspiring heroes have their work cut out for them because….Meanwhile, nearby in their secret underground lair the middle school is plotting to Take Over the World!

 

 

 

You can tell they’re villains. Look, they have a skull and maps and things.

I wasn’t kidding about the underground lair.

They’re ruthless. Some of them even have red eye.

Absolutely reprehensible

 

 

Every year my classes play a game titled simply the Take Over the World Game. Its meant to help with physical and cultural geography, map reading skills, and report writing. Its sort of like a bigger more complicated version of Risk. We generally dedicate some time every Friday to the game. Without fail every Friday someone comes in to ask me, “What are we doing today?” even though they already know. This continual question reminds me of this cartoon, which might provide you a glimpse into my mind when I was in middle school.