10-02-2010

I’m not sure how I could teach without the ability to use a computer.  I exploit YouTube and Google on a daily basis.  I also discovered that they list curse words on Wikipedia. That’s on my own time, not for making spelling lists.  But, if student engagement is more important than content, I may be on to something.  %$#@*ing Cuss Words for 4th Graders: proper usages will be on Amazon’s top 100 list for Christmas 2011.

I don’t want people to see my Google history. Some people, judging people, would get the wrong idea.  I’ve googled dehydrated whiskey.  My brother KC was the one who brought it up to me, so I decided to check it out.  I found nothing, other than learning that if you drink too much whiskey, you will become dehydrated the next morning.  Who knew?  I also googled grow lamp.  Yes, I did check and it was not listed back to back with dehydrated whiskey on the history.  People who judge may presuppose nefarious reasons for my inquiries. 

I used a YouTube video to show the students about base-jumping.  After we watched it, the students wrote about what they saw, and whether they would like to try it someday.  One of the fourth graders was not happy with me that morning.  Most of the students are not shy when it comes to letting you know when they are not happy with you.  “You suck!” roughly translates the same here as it does in WA.  I thanked him for being honest and reminded him he needed to write a complete sentence letting me know how he would feel about base-jumping.  He wrote the sentence “Me and Clay cliff jump and clay die”.  Just in case I couldn’t understand what he wrote, he drew me a picture: a parachute crumpled up next to me laying on the ground, complete with x’s for eyes. As you can imagine, I was upset.  I had just explained how to use the past tense properly in a verb and he completely ignored me.  I thought I had explained it clearly.  “It’s Clay Died!!!”  But, I held in my anger and walked away.

I’m learning that I can’t force kids to like what I want them to do.  If I could, boy this teaching gig would be a hell of a lot easier.  But since it isn’t that way, I’m using the premise of outlast.  If I can outlast a student, I may get my way.  That’s how Monica became my wife.  Patience.  A half an hour later, the student walked up to me and showed me his reworked sentence.  “Me and Clay went cliff jumping and clay did not die."  He even changed the picture, this time with me standing, eyes wide open. Both problems were solved with his rewrite.  I lived another day in class and in one student’s story.  That hasn’t stopped me from continuously googling patience to see if it has an update.