Spend too much time watching the Walking Dead and your opening circle activities look like this:

“When someone is committed to their work, what footprints do they leave behind? What trail is left when they’ve finished?”

JB: People see what you’ve done; they can point at it and understand the accomplishment

HG: The final product makes an impact on people. It creates further opportunities.

ES: They leave behind drafts and revisions; you can see what the work process looked like.

TD: You can show off what you’ve done.

AB: Your name is known.

TC: you’ve provided a model of how you work.

Student posts:

Spent this Wednesday morning talking about people that we know who are inside of their work (and have total ownership of it) as well as describing individuals we don’t know whose life work shows their ownership over their work. The list of characteristics is here:

Time invested
People want to be around them
Their work helps other people
They’ve made changes/adjustments; they know how to do things
Know everything about it; confident in their work
Constantly revising
They are recognized

Student Work:

My dork work (Lisa on the left, author/critic A.O. Scott, whose book I’m loving, is on the right)

even when you still need help?

We began with this today and drew cartoons illustrating the best ways to do this.

Best line: You return to what inspired you in the first place. Hooray JW!

I wanted to spend my week in advisory discussing and focusing on the idea of taking control of your own project, of owning a project, of agency. I missed two days last week — the first time in twenty years I missed two days in a row — and there were mixed results. Some students advanced their projects while others did nothing.

It got me thinking about the work I still do that I want a teacher or a coach for as well as the things I do that I’d like to do on my own. And last night, as I worked on a project with my son, which he had put off until Sunday night, I tried to have the conversation about how one takes control of one’s own work, even when you still need help.

How do you take control of your own work, even when you still need help?

Today, though, I asked the following: why are there teachers? What do teachers do? When do you need teachers? When do you not need teachers?

You need teachers when you don’t know what to do next.
You need teachers when you aren’t self-sufficient.
You need teachers when you don’t know something or a skill.
You sometimes need teachers to simply just monitor students.
You need teachers to help us figure out what we know and don’t.

You don’t need teachers when you have a room of peers to help you.
You don’t need teachers when you’re home.
You don’t need a teacher when you know what you want to do and you can figure it out yourself.
You don’t need teachers to go to the bathroom.
You don’t need teachers to do well on our report card.
You don’t need teachers when it comes time to put into play all of the lessons they’ve taught you.
You don’t need teachers when you’ve learned enough to teach other people.

One place we went quickly in the conversation was that there are “teachers who aren’t in schools” and that “you can learn from people who don’t have much education.”

Mondays are always hard. Always hard. I try to focus on recovering the culture of the room and helping everyone remember the in-school expectations.

This morning I tried to begin by having students nominate themselves and one peer for an “expert board.” My goal was to have a list of students that we can turn to while we are working on projects. I also hoped that describing two of their own traits and then one of their peers’ great traits would rebuild the culture as well, as they reflected on what each person at the table might bring to the projects.

There was enough morning chaos that I had to pull their answers and read (anonymously) the list of skills that kids would bring to all of our projects.

When things are going well, you’re debating what professionals debate. As we work our way into our oral history unit, I felt as though the students were torn: do you find a person to interview and make the center of your oral history or do you find a theme that you’re interested in and then start conducting your interview.

This is an old dilemma for historians. You may want to study something but do not have the sources to pull it off. You can be as creative as you like with the sources you do have, whether they’re documents, statistics, shards of pottery, newspapers, but you can’t write history without sources.

In our conversation today, that’s exactly the issue the students circled, explored, and churned through. Some students seem committed enough to their theme that they’ll keep asking folks until they find a great source. Others want to talk with Grandma so much that they’ll move their theme. Others became aware that no matter how much they want to study something using oral history, in some situations it will may be possible. A couple of examples: interviewing people they have not met will require extensive leg work and interviewing dead people isn’t possible. Yet.