I've got no real solution to this. Just today, I was shooting lasers from my eyes at boys who couldn't seem to handle getting through five sentences without interrupting with something completely off task. "Well, if you don't want to do this this way," I found myself saying, "I suppose I could send it home as homework." This is not the way I want to work. I don't want my classroom to be full of punitive assignments, but I sometimes get frustrated and say unproductive things out of frustration.
That said, I do have something that keeps me from counting the seconds until June 5, 1:50 pm. When I overfill my fourth quarter with goals, I find myself planning things up until the last minute. Doing this has changed my year end regrets. When I was a little baby teacher, I regretted not having more to keep my kids going. Standard curriculum, standardly taught will not keep them going. Overpacking your weeks with cool, collaborative projects, that's the way. Now my regret comes from not finishing everything I wanted to get to.
So what are we working on? We're making a poster book to work as a companion to the You Matter Manifesto by Angela Maiers. Earlier this year, we made a video with the text of the poem that you can still see on our class home page. Now, we're making a poster every day. Each student is going to pick their favorite three or four pages of their own work, and we're going to put it together as a book with a chapter of posters for each line. We'll be making the book available as an eBook later this year, and of course I'll be printing a copy for our class!
We're planning to work on a podcast this spring. The current title is something like Awesome Classcast (I don't remember the particulars). Students will be writing opinion pieces about things they think are awesome, having conversations about their favorite things, and acting out their writing for our podcast. I'm thinking of recording the theme on my Ukulele.
At a professional level, several of my pals and I are working to put together the inaugural EdCamp St. Augustine on May 9. As I write this, we have about 100 people registered, from as far south as Miami, all the way up to North Carolina. We still have some local sponsorships to secure, and some food plans to put in place, but things are looking really cool. One of the things I'm excited for is to have my students make the signage for the event.
Speaking of EdCamp, some of those same pals and I are planning a student EdCamp at our school. We're planning for two sets of two classes to have little mini camps this spring. We've taken inspiration from internet pal Nili Bartley, who put one on with her class. I'm not sure what all is gonna happen, but I'm so excited!
There's more. At the end of the year, I'm flying up to DC for #EdCampUSA. (I wrote that sentence so much more casually than I'm feeling it.) We have our 3D Printer coming sometime soon, we have our Maker Club robots to finish and write about, and we have some SUPER COOL stuff coming up when we study energy.
We may have to postpone the last day of school in my class.