Meanwhile.......in the classroom

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Meanwhile.......in the classroom

1Tess_W
Modifié : Mar 22, 2021, 7:41 pm

So I taught highschool (grades 10-12) for 30 years. I have taught college (freshmen) for 10 years. When I was teaching highschool, I got the students' attention 2-3 times a week with a video or a wild story of an assassination--nothing like a good killing to settle them down.....

So one day I showed John Lennon, the Dakota Hotel, the news reporters were telling how just x amount of years ago he was gunned down. I then shoed the youtube video "Imagine". When it was done, the entire class was silent. Usually there are a 100 comments, everybody talking at once, etc. I asked, any questions, nothing. Finally one student raised his hand and asked, 'Who is John Lennon'? Not one of 24 student knew who he was. When I said he was part of the Beatles, the response was, "Oh, my grandma and grandpa listen to them."

I guess the point of my story is, today's students (most of them) think history is yesterday. If it is any further away, they have no desire to learn about it.

What is your experiences with the "youngsters" and history?

2mlfhlibrarian
Mar 23, 2021, 6:51 am

Kids don’t often pay attention to the news so it is difficult for them to realise that current events are history in the making. When 9/11 happened I was working as a librarian in a boys secondary school in London. It was lunchtime here when a teacher ran in and said ‘there’s something horrible happening in America’.I had a small tv so we switched it on, just as the first tower fell. A group of boys gathered round to watch. One boy said ‘Miss, is this a film?’
I think their shock wasn’t so much at the tragedy, but that they were watching it happen in real time, history happening right in front of their eyes.

3Supprimé
Mar 23, 2021, 10:53 am

>1 Tess_W: I used to run into this all the time with my mass communication class. I would refer to, say, Lawrence Welk or the Marx Brothers, and zip. So I would youtube a clip for them. If they made references I didn't get, I would have them send me a clip. There was a lot of give and take, and we all learned a lot!

42wonderY
Mar 23, 2021, 10:57 am

That recalls the first class assignment in freshman social studies. Sr. Regina Clare had us research the invasion of Czechoslovakia, just happening. It was a quick submersion into news periodicals and a broadening of our worldview.

5John5918
Modifié : Mar 23, 2021, 12:02 pm

Not a classroom, but it reminds me of when I lived in South Africa. Not much more than ten years after democracy came to the country, I had a young woman from a previously-disadvantaged background who used to come to my house to do some cleaning for me, and one day she informed me that she wouldn't be coming tomorrow because it was a public holiday. No problem, I told her, and asked what public holiday it was. She had no idea - for her it was just a day off work. When I looked it up, I found it was a very significant public holiday connected to the liberation struggle. But to her generation apartheid and the struggle against it was just history, and memorialising it was of no interest to them.

Back to the classroom. When I started teaching science in Uganda we were learning about steam, and of course I tried to use the example of a steam locomotive. Blank looks reminded me, (a) that there hadn't been any steam locomotives operating in Uganda in the lifetime of my young students, and (b) that we were a long, long way from the nearest railway line so in fact most of them had no idea what a railway was either. Living and working in Africa for over forty years I have learned the hard way that it is not only age that separates our worldviews, but also culture and geography.

6Crypto-Willobie
Mar 23, 2021, 11:59 am

I know a young lady in her 20s with a degree in the arts who had never heard of Kafka (this came up when she looked blank at our use of 'Kafkaesque'). And her fiancee who has a degree in architecture had never heard of Christopher Wren.

It's not that they weren't experts on Kafka and Wren, but that they simply had never heard of them

7bergs47
Mar 23, 2021, 4:32 pm

>5 John5918: Oh dear is that politics. lol... Nevermind its not easy to talk about south Africa without including politics. ( I am A south African)

8alco261
Mar 23, 2021, 5:06 pm

>5 John5918: I can relate to that. I'll never forget the first time I was trying to explain the odd look of a graph with a logarithmic Y axis to a group of students (I was only in my late 20's at the time) and I said,"You've all seen this before just look at the scales on your slide rulers." ...all I got was blank stares and it occurred to me that between the time I had left high school and the time I was talking to the students pocket calculators had happened and slide rulers were nowhere to be found.

It was much the same thing about a decade back when I was standing out on the front lawn with a small group of kids and younger adults waiting to watch ISS pass overhead. As it did so I happened to say, "Boy, this is just like watching Sputnik I come up over the horizon." Again - blank stares and a small voice from the back of the group - "What's Sputnik?"...so it goes.

9Supprimé
Mar 23, 2021, 5:09 pm

>6 Crypto-Willobie: Some good things get thrown out of curricula. Otoh, good things often get added. I didn't know who Zora Neale Hurston was until after I graded from college in the mid-70s. Am Lit was all Poe, Twain, Whitman, Cooper, Hawthorne, Salinger, Miller, and O'Neill.

10Supprimé
Mar 23, 2021, 5:17 pm

>8 alco261: At least they asked. I like to think it's our job to help Our Young People make these connections with the past instead of reviling them for their ignorance.

My kid was born when I was 42, and I found that his friends often asked me if I remembered things from the past. "My mom is old! She'll know!"

Maybe it helped that I kept a stash of dinky candy bars in my purse and would and them out when they could explain a book, movie, or historical event coherently. It was fun and helped pass the time when I was dragging them around to jazz band competitions.

11alco261
Mar 23, 2021, 6:07 pm

>10 nohrt4me2: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression I thought there was something wrong with the kids - quite the contrary. I just offered the examples in the same vein as >5 John5918: thing change and there is no way you can expect younger people to know what you know about situations/events that were once everyday facts of life for you.

On this line - in my last place of employment I was the designated old guy. All of my co-workers were at least 30 years my junior and were (and are) a great bunch. From time to time I would make a point with an example that referenced something outside of their temporal experience and it would generate a round of good natured laughter. On one occasion I started to make a point - realized I was going to reference something not in their purview and stopped. There was a momentary pause and my boss said, "Let me guess, you were going to reference something that happened before any of us were born." I said, "Correct." and the room exploded.

12Supprimé
Mar 23, 2021, 8:14 pm

>11 alco261: That sounds like fun, and I commend you for your intergenerational tolerance! I am perhaps too quick to assume fogeyism. My husband is constantly freaking out about the march of time--bad music, too many tech changes, high gas prices, confusing health care protocols, poor service in stores, etc. ad nauseam. He was complaining about his co-workers wearing hoodies down at the shop. So I bought him one. Now he thinks they're great, but why do they have to have a logo on the front? Great guy, but it gets wearying.

13John5918
Mar 23, 2021, 11:51 pm

>7 bergs47:

My apologies. The intention was not to make a political point but merely to give an example of a young person who was not aware of something which was of great relevance to older members of her community.

>11 alco261:

A lot of my work over recent years has been providing institutional memory to people who are thirty or forty years younger than me. Their age is compounded by the fact that they only tend to spend from a few months to two or three years in Sudan or South Sudan as aid workers, journalists, diplomats, UN peacekeepers, consultants or whatever, and that while they are there they live in air-conditioned bubbles (or "fortified aid compounds", as one academic has aptly put it) so they are not embedded in the community and they have little chance to absorb the knowledge from their surroundings. These are often people who have a lot of power in their hands and the decisions they make have a real impact on people's lives, and yet they have little understanding of the historical context and the culture in which they work, and don't know any of the local languages, all of which are essential if one is to understand the conflicts and other dynamics which are taking place there. Some, to their credit, recognise their need to learn about the country in which they work. Others already know everything - after all, they are from a "more developed" country and have an MA in international relations, so what have they got to learn?

14Tess_W
Mar 24, 2021, 6:16 am

Another "funny"

Me (teacher): If you want some extra credit, you may interview a Korean vet and report their experiences. (I have them a sheet of instructions)

2-3 days later, a female student raises her hand and asks, "Like what are we supposed to ask these vets? Like, what type of animals they have in Korea, or what?"

Me: No, vet is short for veteran.

2-3 days later:

Same student: My mom won't let me call Korea. We don't even speak Korean!

Oh my!

15vwinsloe
Mar 24, 2021, 9:19 am

>11 alco261:. You are lucky that you work in a place where your comments are valued. There is so much ageism in the modern workplace.

In my office, someone made a tiny diorama in a box and called it the museum of office supplies. In it were things like floppy disks, typewriter ribbon and Wite-out. Fascinating really how much and how quickly things have changed.

16John5918
Modifié : Mar 24, 2021, 10:00 am

>14 Tess_W: Me: No, vet is short for veteran.

That seems to be very specific to north America. As far as I am aware, in most other places where English is spoken vet means veterinarian - I had to look the spelling up as we almost never use the full word!

17Crypto-Willobie
Modifié : Mar 24, 2021, 10:28 am

Ce message a été supprimé par son auteur

18Crypto-Willobie
Mar 24, 2021, 10:32 am

>14 Tess_W: >16 John5918:

I was going to post the Ali G routine where he interviews a veterinarian about vets vs vets, and they get all tangled up. However, in places its humor get very, uh, raw, so I deleted it. Those so minded can find it on Youtube by searching Ali G Vets.

19krazy4katz
Mar 24, 2021, 10:50 am

I am using a zip drive stand as a door stopper. You can't really tell them apart except for the indentation down the middle.

202wonderY
Mar 24, 2021, 10:52 am

I found some of the big, truly floppy, floppy discs in the supply cabinet at work. My younger coworkers had no idea.

21LadyoftheLodge
Mar 24, 2021, 11:59 am

>20 2wonderY: Cleaning out and downsizing here, and I came across boxes of the smaller floppies in a closet.

22WholeHouseLibrary
Modifié : Mar 25, 2021, 1:41 pm

I've got a stack of unused punch cards in a drawer of my desk. Their use is only nostalgia at this point, and occasionally, for note-taking. I'm very sure that after I've I die, my kids are going to be doing a lot of head scratching.

Edited for grammar.

232wonderY
Mar 24, 2021, 12:44 pm

>22 WholeHouseLibrary:. Me too! They’re from my dad’s house. I remember a family day at Wearever Aluminum where they showed us how the punch cards worked. My dad was in on the infant computer field and became a programmer by default. His college degree was in philosophy.

24perennialreader
Mar 24, 2021, 4:08 pm

When I was in college in the 70's, in order to register for your classes, you had to show up (dressed) in the school gym. You had to go around to different stations and pull a punch card for each class. When the punch cards were gone, the class was full.

My kids sat up in bed, turned on their laptops and registered for their classes. Then rolled over and went back to sleep.

At least I didn't have to walk 3 miles to school, up hill both ways, with a hot potato in my pocket to keep my hands warm and ate it for lunch. :)

25alco261
Mar 25, 2021, 9:59 am

...and since we're talking about things that were a fact of life for the older generation but are now forgotten as well as IBM punch cards I suppose it's worth mentioning the size of the IBM punch card was determined by the size of pre-1928 U.S. Currency - there it is - your trivia for the day. :-)

26WholeHouseLibrary
Mar 25, 2021, 1:43 pm

>24 perennialreader: Been there with that walk to school, except it was five miles and we were barefoot. In the winter, we'd wrap our feet with barbed wire for traction.

27alco261
Modifié : Mar 25, 2021, 2:43 pm

Ce message a été supprimé par son auteur

28John5918
Modifié : Mar 26, 2021, 10:13 am

Another little memory which has popped up is when I was working with a multicultural group of youth in west London 40 years ago. For some reason we were doing role play about something or other, and the scenario needed someone to play a policeman. They asked me how to do it, and I trotted out the middle-England stereotype of a friendly bobby, rocking up and down on his toes, knees bent, hands clasped behind his back, saying, "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, what's all this 'ere then?" A young lad of Caribbean background corrected me. "Nah, it's not like that, it's like this" and then snarled, "Get in the back of the van, son!" while miming a vicious kick followed by a couple of heavy blows with a truncheon. Same young man was once in my car with me as we drove past a small police station, not the main one, and out of the blue he casually remarked, "That's a good police station. They don't beat you up in that one". How perceptions change over the generations, but also between races.

29dustydigger
Mar 26, 2021, 9:59 am

When I was in primary school.years 1-6 (1953-59) we still had corporal punishment,and the head and deputy head carried bamboo canes,about 18 inches long - and used them. I got the cane once.I was top of the class,and was seated next to the top boy,Philip Robson(name engraved on my heart!).
We were usually correct in our work,but one day we had a fiendishly difficult sum,and I went wrong. Philip copied my mistake and we were hauled before our teacher who demanded to know who cheated. Philip immediately burst into tears and vehemently denied it was him. Floods of pitiful tears while I stood mouth agape. I got 4 canes on my left hand( hey,dont damage the writing hand,gotta continue writing) and it hurt but not as much as the injustice. Never was friends with Philip the rest of the year,and then we went off to the segregated grammar schools,in different towns and I never saw him again! lol.
At least it was on the hand. The boys were sent off to the Head's office and came back with a hot backside.No wonder Philip did anything to avoid that.

30WholeHouseLibrary
Mar 26, 2021, 2:36 pm

I went to 2 Catholic grade schools (K-8) in northern New Jersey; that is to say that I went to school in 18th Century England.
My folks moved during the summer prior to me starting 4th grade, as we had outgrown the legal capacity of the original house. So, new house, new town.
The school had a mixture of nuns and lay teachers; none of whom were particularly gifted, nor inspiring (not to be confiused with "aspiring") us to achieve anything.
And there was Sister Inez. Stood maybe 4'8"; pretty sure she at least beta-tested dirt, if not actually invented the stuff. In a constant state of rage. We didn't have canes, but there were always yardsticks and pointers (dowels with black rubber tips.) I must recant that. There were always yardsticks and pointers at the beginning of the school year. By the holiday break in late December, there were none to be found. she broke ALL of them over hand, backsides, and occasionally heads of anyone who gave her the slightest excuse to twist off. And none of the parents ever went to the principal to complain. My youngest sibling is ten years younger than I, and Sister Inez was still there, still as sadistically brutal as ever. They stopped ordering yardsticks and pointers at some point, though.

31krazy4katz
Mar 26, 2021, 10:42 pm

Amazing stories! I was very lucky. I lived in a Catholic neighborhood (I'm Jewish). I went to public school, but my parents thought it wasn't very good and I vaguely remember them considering sending me to the Catholic school where my neighborhood friends went. I was terrified because I heard all these terrible stories! Fortunately we moved. Several times. One place I remember we had a racist history teacher. Another place a teacher who swung a kid in a circle by his ear. No rulers or anything like that. I think this was the time when corporal punishment was becoming frowned upon. A number of very frustrated teachers.

32John5918
Modifié : Mar 27, 2021, 11:02 am

I did my entire primary and secondary education in Catholic schools and was lucky to attend more enlightened versions of the Catholic education system than the ones described above, or the worst-case stories which we often see in the media. Terrible aberrations, unfortunately all too widespread. But my schooling was happy and productive, I would say.

My primary school had lay teachers, pretty much all of whom were good as I recall it. Corporal punishment existed but was rarely used, and it was just a single slap on the back of the leg - a bare leg, of course, as we had to wear shorts as part of the school uniform. I don't think it was administered to girls, only boys. This school was only a mile and a half from home so we'd walk there, or occasionally catch a bus.

Grammar school was an all boys school, founded by Jesuits but by then run by lay teachers with just a Jesuit chaplain. Some of them were sadists - chalk and blackboard dusters would be flung at you, our first gym teacher used to use a plimsoll for unofficial corporal punishment, and one or two of them liked to grab you by the sideburns and gradually haul you up until you were on your tiptoes. Sarcasm was widely used by some teachers. Corporal punishment was regulated. It had to be entered in a punishment book. Only the headmaster (nicknamed "Killer") and his deputy administered it - the unlucky recipients had to queue outside their offices during the lunch break to receive their strokes from the ferula, a leather strap with a whalebone stiffener inside it. Maximum was four strokes, on the hand. But generally the teachers were good and inspiring, and very dedicated. Most of the older ones had served in World War II. The headmaster had been a major in Burma, the geography teacher was nicknamed "Joe Lung" because he lost a lung in the RAF. The younger teachers were keen and many had a good rapport with us. We got a first class education.

School uniform was taken very seriously in those days. I had to wear a tie every day from the age of 4 to 17. In grammar school we had to wear shorts until the age of 14 - plenty of cold knees in the winter. Blazers had to be worn every day, but could be taken off in the classroom with the permission of the teacher. In hot weather shirt sleeves could be rolled up in class, again with the teacher's permission. During my six years in grammar school I can remember only one occasion when it was so hot that the headmaster, at morning assembly, gave us permission to remove our ties. We also had to wear school caps until we reached sixth form. One or two teachers delighted in patrolling the route from the school to the railway station to catch boys not wearing their caps. Of course all our clothing had to have our names sewn inside it, so the caps were beloved of bus conductors and railway ticket inspectors. If they found us misbehaving on their buses or trains they would snatch our caps, which would appear on the headmaster's desk the next morning and would be followed by a few strokes of the ferula. The school catchment area was very wide, as there were not so many Catholic grammar schools around, so most of us had long journeys on public transport. I lived about ten miles away, which involved a bus, a train, and then either another bus or a twenty minute walk. The whole journey took about an hour on a good day.

33alco261
Mar 27, 2021, 12:52 pm

Since we're all remembering having to walk to school barefoot, uphill both ways, in driving rainstorms/snowstorms 360 out of 365 days of the year...here's my version. :-)

Because of my Dad's job we moved a lot. One two year stretch in the 1960's found us in the mountains, 2 miles off the main road 16 miles from town, in a valley with high ridges on either side (so no radio and we never owned a TV). The annual snow fall was in the range of 16-20 feet, there was no such things as a snow mobile, the phone line would usually fail after the first big snow storm, and all power was provided by an on-site generator.

During the winter my siblings and I had to snowshoe the 2 miles out to the main road, plant our snowshoes at the top of the high embankment which was almost a vertical drop down to the highway (the road was cleared by massive rotary snow blowers), wait until we could see the school bus coming, and scramble down the embankment to board it when it arrived. When school let out we did the above in reverse.

Since the road into the house was impassable, the propane for the generator had to last us the winter which meant it would kick off promptly at 7 PM. As a result, I did most of my homework by the light of a Coleman lantern. So how did we resupply ourselves with food and other basic life necessities? ...that's a story for another time.

34librorumamans
Mar 29, 2021, 1:10 am

A friend's seven- or eight-year-old granddaughter was visiting her and started exploring the lower shelves of the living room bookcase, where she discovered her gran's LPs. Having slid a disk from its sleeve, she wandered into the kitchen to ask, "Granny, why do these big plates have holes in the middle?"

My friend explained that it was the early form of recorded music and offered to demonstrate, but her granddaughter wasn't interested, merely a bit puzzled why anyone would store tracks in that bizarre manner.

35dustydigger
Mar 29, 2021, 6:38 am

>34 librorumamans: oh dear,that puts us with the dinosaurs,doesnt it.lol.Our record player packed in years ago,but I stubbornly hang on to my precious if useless 45s.And even some beloved videotapes (7years since we had a VCR).
With YouTube built into my TV I have access to so much music.Whatever you say about YouTube,the extraordinary deluge of old music that has been uploaded in the last decade is a wonderful treasure chest of nostalgia.

36Tess_W
Mar 30, 2021, 12:32 am

>35 dustydigger: I agree about YouTube. It's great for "storage" of priceless videos; but it's way too distractive to students during the school day.

37John5918
Modifié : Mar 30, 2021, 3:15 am

>34 librorumamans:, >35 dustydigger:

I've found YouTube to be a really useful personal resource. As well as listening to music, I've been watching a lot of the old British comedy and detective series, many of which I missed when I was overseas during the pre-internet era. In my younger days I used to play the guitar and sing British and Irish folk songs. In those days you learned them by listening to other people playing live, and if you were lucky getting them to write down the words and chords for you - I still treasure in my music file a handwritten copy of the Rawtenstall Annual Fair which one of my mates gave me at university almost half a century ago. Now you just google the lyrics and then have a choice of people to watch performing it on YouTube. Very useful, although somehow it felt like more of an achievement when you had to put some effort into tracking these things down in the good old days. It's like the difference between searching through dusty old bookshops and just ordering an out of print book online from the likes of Abe Books.

38Tess_W
Mar 14, 2023, 8:08 am

Most recent conversation with a highschooler:

Student: Is there anything I can do for extra credit?

Teacher (me): No, but you can complete the assigned work.

Student: No, I want extra credit.

hmmmmm!

39alco261
Modifié : Mar 14, 2023, 12:45 pm

>37 John5918: YouTube also has some outstanding videos which provide clear explanations of any number of technical concepts in math, physics, chemistry, and various engineering fields. There are also a number of individuals with multiple entries who do a good job of teaching almost any language you might be interested in learning or learning about.

40John5918
Mar 14, 2023, 1:07 pm

>39 alco261:

Indeed, there's some very good YouTube videos on building model railways, and on various DIY skills.

41librorumamans
Mar 14, 2023, 3:22 pm

>38 Tess_W:

Ah yes; memories. Nowhere in the curriculum documents does one read that the teacher's primary job in high school is to teach adolescents that reality exists and its elasticity is not guaranteed.