May
20
ELA B10: May 20 Beginning Decisions unit…
- We’re finished using class time to develop the essay students have been working on. I reminded them that it is due Friday, but I also agreed to accept it on Monday so some may use their weekends to edit and type it out.
If I do not receive it on Monday though, they will be given a new essay topic and have to start the process from scratch. I also reminded them they have track on Monday in Outlook but still have to
meet at the school to get on the bus, so they can either use the extension but be careful of the deadline or hand it in on Friday and be safe. - We reviewed the main sub-units in our last unit on Equality. I also reminded them of several skill activities they have spent time on that were not necessarily part of that Equality unit – listening skills, reading skills, the reading assessments for the division and for the province, their blog development, and more recently essay writing skills. These skills will be reviewed and tested throughout the rest of their ELA classes so the time spent on them was important.
- To begin our second unit in the course, though, we looked at the topic of Decisions. They were given a handout with a list of the literature resources in this unit. (See it here.) They have obviously discussed decision making in several classes through their middle years and it would have especially been discussed in their history class. The concept of “cause and effect” is one people generally can recognize but to articulate it is a bit more tricky. We also talked about the reality that not all decisions are the easy ones – if you had a child who was diagnosed with a terminal illness, what would you do? if you were going to get married but felt something didn’t seem quite right, what would you do? Sometimes the choices we have seem equally compelling, and we can’t always anticipate the outcome or consequences. These are the issues we will be considering in the next few weeks through the literature.
- To begin, they answered some personal questions regarding their own decision-making process; this was just to set the tone of our discussions and reading. Then we read a short story together titled “A Kind of Murder” about a new teacher at a school who was too weak to defend himself and a thoughtful student tried to help him out, but when tested the second time decided to leave the man fend for himself. They have eight questions to consider that are expected to be completed for tomorrow’s class.