Finding Damo

The story of a man, his job, two cats and the meaning of success.

Archive for the tag “history”

04 Jun 2015

Differentiation

I’m writing reports. I’m too tired to go and find all of the tired tropes teachers traipse out every time they talk about differentiation.

Wow, massive alliteration bomb right there.

a bird, a monkey, a penguin, an elephant, a fish in a bowl, a seal and a dog in front of a man saying "For a fair selection everybody has to take the same exam... please climb that tree."

Einstein and his tree-climbing exam comes to mind immediately.

The focus for our school in the upcoming years is differentiation, and the first goal is to explore the concept and see what comes out of the dialogue. I’ll dialogue later. I’ll monologue now.

Like an evil villain. Mwahahhahahahahahaha!

See? Tired.

And I worry that, if I create a different lesson plan for each and every one of my students, and then have to mark each one differently to allow for their special abilities, that I’ll be a lot more tired later. Of course, if I spent more time marking work and less time writing blog posts, I might be less tired. But, what can you do?

Here are some thinking points:

  1. Most schools do a great deal to try and raise the grades of students on the left hand side of the bell curve.
  2. What are schools doing to extend those students at the upper end of the scale?
  3. Bored geniuses are… genii? Grant me wishes? I’ll look it up. Bored geniuses (obviously not me) are often discipline problems. They tune out because the work isn’t challenging, or isn’t relevant.
  4. Extending the high achievers definitely involves more work for teachers and will be a bone of contention in planning meetings, even if nobody says anything out loud.
  5. A lot of current educational methods are being made redundant by new technologies.

I’m not offering solutions just yet, just offering points to think about.

If you’re making students answer questions from a text book, differentiation will be difficult. Luckily, this isn’t such a prolific practice as it was when I was younger.

OK. Enough rambling. What are the solutions?

First up, look at the questions you are posing in your assignments. Are you asking students to do something that they can cut and paste from Google?

“What were some of the effects of World War 2 on the world economy?” can be typed into your favourite search engine verbatim, and students can pick and choose a variety of answers to submit as their own. There is no reason to extend myself as a student. My answers might be better than the lower kids’, but I don’t have the motivation.

Essays such as this should be put to rest. Anything that can be Googled needs to be removed from the curriculum. Try this: “Create a radio news broadcast from a specific day in 1946. Include local and world news, sports, business and weather reports”

They can Google the information but they still need to use it in an original way. You’ll have already taught them about how to be web-search literate, finding accurate and relevant information from authoritative sources. They’ll rationalise their choice of information in their updated bibliography.

They can be assessed on ICT knowledge, History knowledge, speaking and listening in English and hopefully group work.

Secondly, create tiered assignments based on your knowledge of the students. Each tier should have opportunity to stretch themselves, allowing the teacher to move them up for the next work task.

My Engineering and Design class is called The Evil League of Evil. Students start off as Minions, and work towards becoming SuperVillains. The first tasks have them following instructions and showing me that they can gather evidence. It also allows for a variety of responses, allowing those with higher skills to show this. The boys create Lego robots, designing and planning before creating, and finally evaluating their own and others’ creations.

The second task is split into three. They can Build a Robot – if they still need more help – using instructions and continuing to record evidence. They can Design a Robot – Henchman level work that gives them some autonomy but still working on a task I’ve set them. Or they can Invent a Robot – the Villain level work which lets them create a bot from scratch with no intervention from me.

From there, I can shift boys up and down the ranks, depending on how they respond to challenges. They know where they are at all times, and have the impetus to try and reach that highest level.

And of course, we finish the semester with an all in Robot Battle Royale, for those who have achieved a high enough level. Once reports are done. To keep them going for the last two weeks. There are prizes. It’s great.

I know people are thinking “But yeah, practical subjects like that lend themselves to differentiation! And think of all the extra work you just did!”

First up, I’m using Stile, which I love. It allowed me to simply copy the activities into different classes, and I could simplify the language for the minions and add a couple of bonus activities for the Villains. So, not so much extra work.

stile2
stile

Secondly… Well, sure,  you might have a point. Differentiation is easy in practical subjects. But I can come up with dozens of ways to differentiate an English or History lesson off the top of my head.

Leading to my final point in this mad ramble. One that I’m sure you’ve heard from me before: Collaboration. Nobody should have to do all of this work alone. I have a great team working with me in Technology, so assigning tasks and year levels is easy and the results are fantastic. Use your team. Have a regular spot in the morning briefing, in every staff meeting. Have one staff member share a success story in differentiation. It doesn’t have to be subject neutral. But it could give the rest of the staff that spark that lets them do the same in their classes.

I want to go into depth here. I’ve been working with differentiation for over 10 years. But I also want to keep this under 1000 words (or one picture). So I’ll stop and add more later.

Five words to go! Whoo hoo!

…Damn.

Posted in Differentiation, education, perryperrysource and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
24 May 2014
3 Comments

Let’s Kill Hitler

rory punches hitlerEvery time someone brings up time travel, someone mentions killing Hitler.

“If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?”

It’s either kill him as a baby or kill him as an adult. As a baby he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Plus, killing babies is less than savoury for most people (whereas killing adults seems to be totally fine). As an adult, he may have already done too much damage to stop by just removing him from the equation.

EDIT: After being linked this by three different people on three different social networks, I thought I’d better add this in:

To properly answer the question, you first need a Year 9 Humanities class brief history of Adolf. Here are some excerpts from one of my students from last  year:

“Adolf Hitler was born from Klara Polzl and Alois Hitler on the 20th of April, 1889 in a small town in Austria named Braunau, and is most commonly known for being Germany’s leader during World War 2. Hitler was the fourth child Klara had given birth to, as the three before had died. Hitler had a younger sister named Paula. “

“Alois was a strict senior customs official who took beatings upon his wife and even his son. After Hitler read that the brave man gives no sign of being in pain, Hitler told his mother: “father hit me thirty-two times… and I did not cry”. Klara, Adolf’s mother, was a very kind woman who only wanted Adolf to succeed and do well in life, as she did not want to lose another child.”

“While Hitler disliked most of his teachers, he had one which he paid respect to, which was Leopold Potsch, his history teacher. Potsch, being a German Nationalist, taught Hitler and his pupils about Germany’s victory over France. Hitler was inspired by Potsch in the long run to be a Nationalist.”

“Throughout his life, he had consistent bad grades with the exception of his skill in art. When his entry to an art school was declined, he was shattered, and lived in Vienna pretending to be an art student trying to make his mother proud. While he lived in Vienna, he mostly walked parks, observed buildings, and visited libraries. In the summer of 1909, Hitler lived on the streets.”

Caught up? Good. By 1925 it was pretty much too late. He’d written Mein Kampf, been to prison and had a following of people that would probably have continued with the reich even if Hitler was out of the picture.

So any killing of Hitler needs to be done before then, probably around 1909 when he was living on the streets.

Right?

Bloodthirsty bastards! Why do we have to kill Hitler? Why bloody our own souls? Here’s an alternative that doesn’t come up very often: Be nice to Hitler.

Let me present you with a scenario: Someone is coming back to kill you from the future. In about five years’ time you will do something that will cause the death of billions of people. With the invention of time travel, all of this death can be avoided simply by killing you. Are you ok with that? Or would you like to see someone try an alternative option first?

SARAH CONNOR HITLERWow. Hitler is sort of like Sarah Connor.

Anyway.

Hitler hated his teachers. He was bored at school. He was excluded from art college, he was beaten by his father. He was lazy but intelligent. He only had one testicle.

I can’t do anything about the last one, but as a time traveller, especially if we can travel about willy-nilly to do what we want, we could negate a number of bad influences in his life, making him, if not a good person, at least one who is politically ambivalent, not disposed to prejudices towards certain races and safe out of the way in an artist’s colony somewhere.

Here’s the plan:

  • Ditching Alois – the father, were you not paying attention? – by causing a bar fight between him and a burly psychopath in a pub somewhere. The man drank a lot. He also looked after bees. Strange.
  • Work at his high school, being a mentor to the young Hitler and giving him challenging books about being nice to people. Let’s get this Potsch teacher fired as well.
  • Bribe someone at the arts school to get him accepted. A Hitler making a living at art is not a Hitler trying to take over the country.
  • Finally, get someone to hire him, somewhere well out of Berlin.
  • Oh, and every time he tries to grow a moustache, shave it in his sleep.

Voila! No more evil dictator.

If I wanted to go further, I’d be talking to the leaders of France and England and suggesting that if they don’t want a second world war, they should go a bit easier on the country they just defeated. If they hadn’t been so heavy-handed in their sanctions, German Nationalism wouldn’t have received so much support from the general populous.

Of course, maybe people have been trying this for decades. Changing time and each time getting someone worse, until last time, when the time traveller stopped the evil dictator Gordon Champott, who had destroyed most of the civilised world from his seat in England, and when he got back, found that Hitler had risen to power in his stead.

And maybe a world war at this point in time, before the rise of nuclear weapons, was better for the planet as a whole.

But seriously, if someone gives you a time machine, just think about your actions before you go and murder someone, just to see what happens.

I would be incredibly irresponsible in this.

I would be incredibly irresponsible in this.

Posted in rant, Teaching and tagged , , , , , , , ,

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