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Arkansas to
Los Angeles and Then Back Again
As a beginning teacher back at the dawn of the Internet era I had my students
at Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles, California email students in Mrs.
Gray’s
English
Class
at Pinkston Middle School in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Not a terribly imaginative
assignment, but for the time it was very cutting edge. I think I had had an
email address for only a month or two when I thought this "keypals" assignment
up.
My
students loved writing to students on the other side of the continent, and
the senseless shooting of nearby Los Angeles teacher Alfredo Perez
gave the communication
drama.
I had a rough stay in the rough neighborhood where Berendo Middle School
is found, but I remember clearly this class of special sixth graders all
these years later.
They
wrote
me this "one
last thing." Career-wise, it was a start. I did my best.
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CRESCENT RISING
The Divided Realm:Islam at the End of the 20th Century
As opposed to Berendo where I was pretty much left to “sink or swim,” Milken
invested serious time, money, and attention to my professional development. In
1998 they paid a consultant to fly from New York to LA to train myself and several
other Milken teachers over two full workdays on “webquests.” I got
intense training on Bernie Dodge’s project-based curriculum, Grant Wiggins
and his “essential questions,” and then Milken paid me a $2,500
stipend that next year to develop and teach a webquest. They also paid other
teachers to do this, and we met periodically at night to give each other support
and get feedback -- this is what I call “professionalism,” and neither
before nor after have I ever seen that level of support and quality control from
administration in public school.
I worked long and hard on this webquest, and the lessons I learned in developing
and teaching this project I never forgot. It was a crucial step in my development
as a teacher. So many years later, I am still proud of this unit – teaching
Islam (and Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, among other topics) to Jewish middle
school students in Los Angeles two full years before the events of September
11th 2001 brought these topics to America’s full attention.
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Brave
New World? Or Slouching Towards Gomorrah?
I designed this project immediately after I joined the staff
to help found Foothill Technology
High School in August of 2000.
FTHS was created as a project-based school focusing on technology,
and every
single 9th grader completed
this project and thereby signaled a new way of teaching in the “new
school in town.” We made the local
newspaper with it, and I was
co-winner of the Impact II Disseminator Award and Ed Lyon Award for
Excellence in Education for this project.
This was one of the highlights of my early career – or my entire
career, for that matter. I am still proud of it.
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Mustapha
Mond's Department of Propaganda
Growing up with the school, in 2001 I started the first honors class
at Foothill. This was a special 9th grade English class full of ambitious
students who grew academically as I grew professionally -- the school
began to acquire a serious reputation for academic excellence in the
process. I build a 9th grade curriculum comparing and contrasting
contemporary technological
society
with
fictitious future dystopias as illustrated by George Orwell’s 1984 and
Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World -- and this project was undertaken
after completing the latter novel.
This project was the vehicle by which I learned to edit digital video – a
talent that paid huge dividends professionally over time.
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Little Book of Life Instructions
I tweaked a unit taught by a former colleague at Milken and gave it a
technology application in Life’s Little Book of Instructions project.
Not terribly ambitious academically, it allowed students during the difficult
months of “Farch” to have a hand’s on ability to link
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” to their own lives.
Perhaps it is more a middle school than a high school assignment,
but then I was mandated to teach that middle school-level (in my humble
opinion) book by Lee to high school freshman so it makes sense. A good
idea which allows for creativity and creates a link between home and
school for students, but it does not ask for much high-level reasoning.
Alas.
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Ars Poetica
I hooked into the very cool Favorite Poem Project from and out of Boston College, and after showing multiple instances from that program towards the end of my poetry unit I had students make their own presentations on their favorite poem. Between the speakers from the FPP and my own examples, a very personal unit from the teacher that hopefully would bring a similarly invested presentation on a poem from student.
In honor of the larger program, we named this the "Foothill Technology High School Favorite Poem Project."
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Dear Joey...
Back in the days when I was first beginning to catch fire with regards to project-based learning and curriculum “backwards planning,” I created this project to culminate a “media literacy” unit. I never have the time to use this lesson, nor really intend to teach it; I just made it out of the love of creativity and joy in planning curriculum that would take up much of my leisure time - an example of a certain time of my life, as marriage and children would come to severely ,restrict my time to do such things. But this project has huge possibilities in terms of comparing and contrasing media diets in different parts of the world and focusing on what is healthy and ideal for young people.
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Odysseus Needs a Job!
A quick and easy assignment that takes the events of The Odyssey and allows students to get practice making cover letters and resumes. The California State standards say I must teach business letters and applying for a job, so I created this assignment with Homer's story of homecoming. The assignment sounds like a lot of fun, but I have never actually used this lesson.
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Odysseus Letter Assignment
I have actually done this assignment over many years. In groups of four students must choose a character from The Odyssey and write a letter to Odysseus during the time he was away from Ithaca. If you hover over one of the pictures on the webpage, you will see a link to student work.
Students often have great fun with this assignment and come up with creative and humorous letters. Listen to a few of them!
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Shakespeare in the Quad
Shakespeare, from the student perspective, only begins to make sense really after one has acted his plays out. One learns line by line, struggling with the language; then there is the intonation, the framing of the shots, and the acting… It is a enormous amount of work.
This project allows students to take responsibility for staging an act from Romeo and Juliet for the teacher to film for them. The project is time-consuming, but by the time students have studies the text, figured out the staging, and acted out the play they know everything going on in the play: that is how it should be with Shakespeare, which can be like a foreign language to young adults (and not-so-young adults). I also allow students to stage the play in contemporary contexts, connecting the language of the past to the passion, hormones, and parental tensions which are endemic to youth.
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FTHS Travel Agency
A group project that sets up a mock travel agency that employs students to conceive, plan, budget, and then explain and market a vacation to a certain part of the world. Students had to research on the Web what actual airlines, railroads, hotels, and restaurants cost as they made up a tour of a certain country or region. What would tourists want to see? What does this country have to offer in terms of history, culture, food, entertainment, museums, and landscape? By the end of the project students had made a vacation plan that they could actually use next month, if they had the money and wanted to do it. I imagine being a travel agent is not so very different than their role in this group project.
This was a great way not only to learn how to work in groups but also to learn physical and cultural geography.
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My Personal Budget
I introduced this project thusly. “Don’t like living with your parent’s rule? Then quit complaining, get a job, move out, and pay for your own upkeep!” This project directs students to gain employment, find housing, arrange for transportation, make a budget, and then examine the cost of living on various incomes. “Do you think it is so easy to live on your own?” Students don’t fail to realize the difficulty of paying for one’s upkeep on minimum wage when it is all explained so clearly on an Excel spreadsheet.
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"We Were There..."
This group project takes the events of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and has them acted out in an in class simulation. But there is one catch: we use the modern media and tactics of contemporary lobbyists to weigh in on one side or another. This allows students to learn the politics of that time well while also comparing and contrasting the very different media landscapes, appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of the late 18th and early 21st centuries and their manners of politicking.
A mainstay of my American Experience class, I have almost a decade of student artifacts and DVD videos of speeches and debates from this mock Constitutional Convention. In fact, I simply give student group copies of exemplary student work, and students have all the answers to the history and format of what their group need accomplish. The project by this point almost teaches itself.
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Thomas Jefferson: A Re-Evaluation
Perhaps the most ambitious project I ever created, the dreaded “Jefferson Project” looks at the historiography of Thomas Jefferson from multiple different sources and challenges students to cite and explain the various opinions about Thomas Jefferson through American history, and then to add their own opinion. This research opinion starts from the polemical assertion by Irishman Conor Cruise O'Brien" that Thomas Jefferson should be removed from the pantheon of American democracy, and students then move through several hundreds of pages of argumentation by famous American historians on the life, message, character, and legacy of Thomas Jefferson in the United States. Students must respond to O’Brien’s claim, and research papers typically came out around 30 pages.
I was always proud of this Advanced Placement United States History assignment, as it smacked of something more properly assigned in graduate school. It was intensely exhausting for both teacher and student.
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The Bards Appear!
My Advanced Placement classes were very focused on certain ideas, events, dialectics, and trends in the American historical and contemporary experience. Students had little control of the curriculum which moved quickly and deeply, although they were always encouraged to develop their own unique responses to larger historical debates. But at the end of first and second semesters I allowed students to take control of a project and open a window into the emotional reality of what had been their junior year of high school. I challenged students to capture the artistical reality of their time as did Walt Whitman to the America of his time, hence the name and thrust of the project: "Canvas Ventura, California; 21st Century Panorama." The focus was less on the “curriculum” and more on the “self.”
Students appreciated the open-ended nature of these commonplace books which allowed them to do whatever they wanted however they wanted and often spent hours and hours on them. Over the years I have scanned in thousands of examples of insightful and powerful student work from commonplace books, and these artifacts are testament to years of stressed out students laboring through adolescence in AP classes. I modeled their final work on the commonplace books of the Renaissance time, one of which I myself kept through college.
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Civil War Newspaper
This project takes both major and minor personalities from the American Civil War and forces students to research their points of view and experiences and then report them from the first person in what becomes a full length multipage newspaper designed with print journalist software.
I had hoped to take these newspapers and sell them at Civil War re-enactments. Alas, I never had the time to perform this project due to the exigencies of Advanced Placement curriculum. One day, perhaps, if I enjoyed more freedom to cover less “breadth” and go into more “depth” I will do this. I look forward to it!
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Abraham Lincoln: Rhetor Extraordinaire
This project intricately inspects the idea of Abraham Lincoln as a master wordsmith and forces students to see the verse in Lincoln’s prose poems in his major Civil War speeches: students in groups of four take his paragraphs and convert them to stanzas, following the logic and flow of the clauses – the music of the words and cadence and rhythm.
We convert the prose to verse and then back into prose, etc. Students make choices about
Then it ends with students making their own eulogies, a la The Gettysburg Address, with several years of creative and high-interest student examples.
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The New Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds
This group project takes the events of August 1945 and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and looks at them from various perspectives: Harry Truman, an American soldier, a scientist from the Manhattan Project, and a Japanese survivor. Each will present their views on the first use of nuclear weapons in combat, and then numerous scholarly articles and newspaper letters to the editors will be read. Finally, we will look at the historiography on this event and focus on recent revisionist historians (and their critics), using the 1988 AP United States History DBQ on this history. Complexity, complexity, complexity!
Lastly, we will write on the controversy where students can explain at length their own thinking on whether the United States was justified in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Similar to the question, “Was the Civil War about slavery?”, this prompt always generates plenty of passion and noise from students. I prime the pump by framing the prompt thusly: “Resolved, that Harry Truman is a war criminal.” The questions was designed to be polemical and garner a response.
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The Declaration of Independence, Applied
I use Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence” to instruct students on the rudimentaries of rhetoric: deductive and inductive reasoning, etc. This is in addition to teaching the history of what was a legal document creating a state, declaring war, and explaining the cause thereof.
Afterwards I have students make their own declarations of independence, and after showing various examples from the past students often come up with fascinating, humorous, and piquant documents – including one year when an entire class declared their independence from me.
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The Stoic Intellectual Tradition Gets a Facelift
In the world of ideas across history, it amazes how rarely anything is truly new. Mostly ideas and trends go in and out of style, and sooner or later what is “out” will be back “in” again. So it is with the stoic philosophy of the ancient Roman Seneca who sounds very similar to certain of the 19th century Transcendentalist philosophers. In this assignment students must get three quotes from Seneca, three from Henry David Thoreau, and then three students must make up in the same tradition.
In this assignment students must write a fictitious poetry review in 1859 for the fictitious "Long Island Daily News," commenting on new poet Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." In their article students must comment on the novelty of this new poety, do a close reading of the poem, and then (in their learned opinion) comment on the literary quality of the poem.
In particular, I wanted students to get to the heart of the theme of the poem and explain what was Whitman’s point. After walking them through Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and portions of Leaves of Grass, I wanted students to take a stab out at this without any help from teacher. Students will make an actual newspaper layout to their MS Word publication of their newspaper article.
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Critical Transfer of Power
In various complicated presidential elections, I like to slow the events of that time down and inspect exactly what happened between the election and the inauguration of a new president. In the elections of 1800, 1824, 1860, and 1876 I have students complete a storyboard about what happened step-by-step as the country waited to understand the demos and its will.
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Change Versus Continuity
Historians talk often about interpreting any period of time (especially times of reform and/or change) in terms of change versus continuity. How much did the United States change from 1763 to 1790? From 1850 to 1876? From 1920 to 1933? From 1960 until 1975? In this assignment I have students make a brochure where they look at the big picture and seek to judge how much change actually took place versus how much stayed the same. Sometimes students complain the assignment smacks a bit of busywork, but I remind them it is exactly these kinds of concerns that become AP US History questions at the end of the year.
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Student As Legislator
Do you think it is easy? Do you feel as if you could have done a better job than the politicians in the past did, if you were just given the chance? Well, now students GET that chance in this group project. I instruct students in groups of four to come up with a better Reconstruction policy for the United States after the Civil War than was created either in Congressional or Presidential Reconstruction. They most often come up with the same problems as did the mid-19th century participants, and I mercilessly critique their plans and unmask the difficult issues that resist solution. I want students to look beyond conventional answers to different ways of looking at the problem – going to the heart of the issue, taking truly drastic and unexpected steps. In this project students surely learn the history, but more importantly they can see how difficult are the challenges politicians face and yet how the sky is the limit in terms of how one could use power as a life-giving force to improve the world.
In 2010 we did this “Philosopher King” project online with a class in Atlanta, Georgia. Not only were students excited to meet, work, and share ideas with students from a different part of the country, but young adults from the South were able to give unique perspectives about race, the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the Confederate flag to students from California who do not share that perspective. I was very happy how this online project went off almost flawlessly, and whipped students into a fine frenzy to engage deeply a complicated era of history and learn complicated truths. And students learned all this mostly from each other and their research, not from instructors or from direct instruction.
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My Personal Budget
I introduced this project thusly. “Don’t like living with your parent’s rule? Then quit complaining, get a job, move out, and pay for your own upkeep!” This project directs students to gain employment, find housing, arrange for transportation, make a budget, and then examine the cost of living on various incomes. “Do you think it is so easy to live on your own?” Students don’t fail to realize the difficulty of paying for one’s upkeep on minimum wage when it is all explained so clearly on an Excel spreadsheet.
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