Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

Category: Five Pursuits

Writing & Research

Something I have mentioned in other posts is I like the kids to do assignments where they are writing a little bit. This post will emphasize the more technical importance of this, particularly from the perspective of developing skills. What I try to do once a week is have the students do some sort of writing assignment where they have to write at least a paragraph of content. This can range from a creative writing assignment to researching a specific topic or topic of their choosing, but the goal is to get the kids to practice writing. As someone who just went through 4 years of college and had to write six trillion essays, I understand how important it is to be able to write a good essay. By having these kids practice writing with me giving specific parameters/structures (eg I want a paragraph to have 1 intro sentence, 4-5 fact sentences and 1 conclusion sentence) I hope to build up their ability to write. If they can write a good paragraph, they can write a good essay. If they can write a good essay, they can get a good college grade. Simple math in my opinion. While the kids certainly bemoaned this, I do hope the regular practice helped strengthen their writing a bit, though I did not do this enough to see a clear change in their overall writing quality.

December 13, 2024
Efficiency vs Joy

During the course of the special ed assignment we had to do for Jen Phuong I observed a student of mine who agreed to be the subject of this assignment. The basis of me picking her was she can goof off quite hard in class and get distracted from doing the work, which seemed like a good sort of low-stakes thing to do this assignment about. The logical idea I explored is her efficiency with doing the work by minimizing her sociality as much as possible, particularly with her best friend. This was immediately observable when I sat in on her English class where her best friend or any other close friends of hers were not present. And what I noticed was a profound sadness. The joy and exuberance she brought to period 4 was nowhere to be seen, I don’t recall her smiling once. Now the idea mentioned above was right, she got her work done in the class exceptionally well and fast, having no distractions to hinder yet. And yet, it just seemed plain wrong. It was this observation that made me realize the importance of class not just being about getting the work done as quick and effectively as possible. It’s not worth it if the students are downright miserable (or at least look miserable). In my mind it became immediately more acceptable that the student in question have her moments of sociality and distraction, because it brought an energy of joy that was just as important to the class as her doing the work. Now obviously she has to be reined in once in awhile because there is such a thing as too much distraction, but there needs to be a balance because miserable working students is just not worth it.

November 26, 2024
Summer Reading Notes
Unearthing Joy:
1. I appreciated how digestible the book is written. A lot of texts about education get to be very technical or dense that makes it hard if not near impossible to parse what exactly is being said. This book does a good job getting its concepts across without me having to re-read a section over and over.
2. I found it interesting how the book provides a multitude of mediums to help get the point(s) across and sort of establish the mood. Beyond the texts and graphs there are also playlists at the start of each chapter as well as little coloring pages. Admittedly I found the coloring pages a bit childish, but hey if it helped someone understand the book then power to them.
3. I resonated with the ideas of joy and genius being the sort of thematic lynchpins of the book with every student being afforded recognition as being smart and the need for there to be joy in both learning and life in general.
4. I thought the core ideas of the book were interesting. The HILL model was a good way of tying together the sort of general steps of making teaching history something that can strengthen a student’s identity and ability to control the world so they can change it for the better. The five pursuits needed for the HILL model to succeed were also interesting and fit well into what the HILL model was. Didn’t feel crammed or forced together, if that makes sense. There is clear logic that connect the pursuits and HILL model.
Building an Academic Community:
1. I am very fond of the way this book is constructed where it breaks things down into clear objectives and timelines. I like that sort of rigid structure when it comes to accomplishing bigger things as it makes things digestible and comprehensible for me rather then me struggling to wrap my head around all of these ideas and concepts and whatnot.
2. I thought this sort of rigid structure works well in tandem with the more free form ideas put forward by the Unearthing Joy book. There is a sort of yin-yang between the two I think that help to flesh each other out, BAC providing more tangential and physical ideas while UJ provides more intangible values and such through its HILL model. I can definitely see one merging the two books together for the first month of the school year.
3. The flow of the goals and such for every week made sense to me. It felt like building foundations within a foundation based around teaching, behavior and routines.
4. One question I have is I wonder what is missing from this or would be changed in a high school setting. I imagine a lot of this is applicable for those higher grades, but I would imagine the author would change the book a fair bit to meet those standards. Given I am going to teach in a high school setting, it is important I know how much of this book is actually usable.
August 23, 2024