I had a pang of guilt regarding a letter I need to write soon and thought I’d begin class this way: think about a project that evolved over time and explain how someone might recommend you based on this project. There were a number of telling letters — for the conversation I had them discuss other individuals at the table and projects they completed — but the negative one below shows a level of self-awareness that is truly compelling. And sad. When s/he’s rich and famous, I’m going to send this their way.

Rainy Monday morning. Taking up another ideal of ours — problem solving — somewhat obliquely with this journal question:

How do projects evolve or change or develop? What factors affect the process? Why do projects change?

Some of the responses we talked over:
* people find a better way
* people’s minds change
* people want to challenge themselves; think beyond where they are.
* when things aren’t going well, finding a way to change it.
* people are dissatisfied

JW: Projects are like building a model. First it’s on a piece of paper, then a replica (a small view of what everything is supposed to look like), then it’s the real live model. The way you start to build will affect the outcome. So the process is everything: if it is created strongly than most likely what you will build will be.

Working with an awesome group of tenth graders during second project block. Building on the work kids did last year, they’ve set out to conduct interviews, record them, write about them, with the end goal of a website and conference.

It’s hard for kids to find interviewees/narrators so the project isn’t moving as quick as I would like. I would have preferred to have spent today’s time working on their documents, doing research, editing recordings, but it wasn’t to be.

Instead we had a glorious conversation on the principles one ought to use while doing oral history. After writing their own ideas for “rules” they should live by, we broke into groups to translate the principles laid out by the Oral History Association.

Here are their translations. Not perfect but pretty awesome for a Friday.

This is a solid lesson with important objectives. It’s also the last thing I thought would produce a thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation. You never can tell (great Friday song).

Most students like the idea of advice columns. I usually get one or more proposals a year where students want to respond their peers and offer suggestions (demands?) about what they ought to be doing. We wrote letters to ourselves today to offer advice about how we could best handle feedback. I didn’t spend a lot of time processing this morning as the momentum towards Friday deliverables was palpable.

Student version:

One I wrote for myself. Last word is things.

We began with this statement — our class where we do our work — and tried to explain how feedback makes this happen. In other words, what role does feedback play in making this statement true?

MH noted that “feedback powers the projects”.
AB let us know that “feedback helps us work harder?”
IJ said that it helps you to “reflect”. I started singing this song because feedback helps you reflect on how you got there…I sounded pretty good too.

Today I hoped we could all talk about the intention of feedback. I wanted to think about how the intention changes based on the quality of the work. Each student had to write about how intention of feedback shifts for outstanding, mediocre, and bad work.

Terrific, terrific conversation.

Intention of feedback on outstanding work:
get help winning contests
taking things to the next level (getting published?)
to make a better connection with the audience
feedback (helps you) figure out why something is outstanding.

Intention of feedback for “bad” work
helps you figure out a different direction to go in
helps you know why the work is so bad
what can you do better?
should make you feel like working and rising to a challenge

One example:

In advisory last week we talked of ownership and what it means to be inside a project. This week we’re turning to feedback: how to seek it, how to use it, when to build on it, when to ignore it, and what constitutes good feedback.

Monday morning we did a collaborative activity where students made a list of types of feedback, passed their papers to a colleague who wrote out an example of that sort of feedback, and concluded with a second colleague writing about when such feedback is helpful and when it is not. This is standard Monday morning “let’s write instead of talk because everyone is crazy from the weekend” but the results offer a window into how our group is seeing and feeling feedback.

Now if I could just a find a time machine so that I could offer more (and better) feedback.

Monday.   Mondays suck.

We’re beginning the new process of designing our own projects.   There’s a group of thoughtful young men who want to do a video that explores police brutality and the interactions they’ve experienced with the police.  It could be an amazing project.

Last year we wrote plays.  (One of the plays was a first place winner in a regional playwriting contest).  Before we started the plays, though, we had to research the topic it would be based on.   We constructed “dossiers” of their research that they then used to write their play.   It was hard work and most kids struggled with it.

But today, today, today, one of these fine young men said the following:

“hey, what if we made a dossier for this project.  We could collect all our research there.”

If all they took from last year was that it’s important to gather your research in one place and then synthesize it before you start a project…I can live with that.

Yeah, so it was a radio show and then a television show and then a show hosted by a disgraced Philadelphia comedian. Today, though, I was thinking about the kinds of comments students start to make when the work begins to get difficult.  There’s always a grace period, a honeymoon period, a fun “hey this project is cool” period at the start of a project.  As Dr. Malcolm notes,

“Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.”

Today was one of those days when you felt the tension of the work becoming real and difficult.  I wrote these on the board as I heard them and on random scraps of paper.

“I don’t like words.”
“I know, I know, but that’s hard.”
“But I’d have to do that after school!”
“I’m not doing that.”
“I know I should, but that’s hard.”
“That’s like extra work.”

It’s a measure of my growth as a teacher that I can hear some of these statements and not lose my mind.  Some of these are attempts to push buttons and I can feel them as such (and ignore them).  Some of them, though, are real statements of frustration as students realize that this is past the worksheet, past answering the odd problems, and past just pleasing the teacher.

And it’s real. Any work that’s not just following a recipe or a repetitive task creates the same angst.

Part of the way we’re trying to solve this problem is by orienting the work towards the outside world.  I wrote papers in high school because my teacher told me to and because if I didn’t, I’d get a bad grade.   You can’t eliminate this part of school.  The difference for us is that if we’ve made the project as authentic as possible, as focused on the real world as possible, then the student feels (or hopefully feels) the pull of doing something that actually matters.   For this project, if we do it right, they will have begun a catalog of community organizations that ninth and tenth graders can read about and formulate possible projects.  We’ve made clear that their work will be shared with the entire school as well as the organizations they’re writing about.  If successful, they have something they’ve made, something that might make the school and maybe even the world a bit better.