One of the many great things about Philadelphia is the Fairmount recycling center. KC and I went there yesterday — she filled the six buckets with compost on her own — after stopping at the only good bagel place in Philadelphia.
Here’s the link to the analysis of the compost we picked up. I could spend weeks reading and decoding this with students.
Opened today by looking at a project as a ship and the likely obstacles that might present as icebergs. Once they did the drawing — and man do people love drawing — we passed the paper and their peers drew rescue planes. Or rescue fish. Or rescue whales.
Our students have gotten good at identifying strategies. What we need to work on is tracking how we implement those strategies and measure their success.
Example one: 
Example two:
Sorry for the big block quote. I just finished The Last Bookaneer, which made me think about Kidnapped and reading it thirty-five years ago. I was skimming Browsings last night and found these two the description of these two courses, the very thought of which makes me want to be an undergraduate English major.
Michael Dirda writing at The American Scholar
Last year, for instance, I taught a course at the University of Maryland entitled “The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915,” covering 10 books. Given those dates, you can probably guess half the titles on the reading list: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet; G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; A. Conan Doyle, The Lost World; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; and John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
If one were to characterize all these disparate works, one might settle for the phrase “comfort books.” Other descriptive clichés come to mind: ripping yarns, action-packed swashbucklers, escapist fantasies, boys’ books. All accurate designations, but I will make the case that such stories are as important to our imaginations as the more canonical classics.
To my delight, the class proved immensely popular. Students said that it reminded them of why they had majored in English: not because they could hardly wait to read the latest in literary theory, but because they loved stories. This spring the Maryland English Department invited me back to teach again. Did they want me to take over a graduate seminar devoted to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes? Lead a class through the complete critical works of Gayatri Spivak? Teach Provençal poetry? Not a bit. Instead of these worthy projects, I’m back discussing “The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973.” Our reading list picks up where the previous one left off and includes: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest; H .P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness; Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios; Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers; Charles Portis, True Grit; and William Goldman, The Princess Bride.
In our week thinking about how projects develop, how we keep them moving, and what we do to solve problems, I asked everyone to do a drawing of how their project might resemble the layers of an onion. I’m trying to help everyone see the connections between all the work they’re doing.
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.
Here’s the Old Farmer’s Almanac version
Here’s the PA Master Gardener’s Version.
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.
I read this piece on Sunday and this paragraph has stuck with me all week:
The point of the hackathon was to sketch out in code potential solutions to “robot tasks”—routine aspects of a teacher’s job that don’t require teaching skills. Kimberly Johnson, the head of product success and training, addressed the team. “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it,” Johnson said.
I’ve been racking my brain all week trying to come up with a “robot task” I do that consumes more than ten-fifteen seconds. Some robot tasks are also things that students should learn to do as part of daily life: organizing their work into a table of contents or plugging up computers or taking care of the room. And most “robot tasks” I like to use as a break from intellectual work: taking attendance or passing back the initial pile of papers for kids to sort themselves.
None of these add up to even five minutes over the course of a day.
