I have noticed that in two of the teaching activities I do during the week I just fade off to the side of the room and have very little direct involvement. The kids run the class, and they run it well. The two activities are:
- reading from the projected image of the story on the screen.
- the Word Chunk Team activity.
In reading, I have the story up there for everyone to see on Wednesday (or whenever I do that after the creation of the story), and the Reader Leader stands to the left facing the screen and directs the reading, and the Signer signs the story (this keeps everything slow bc it is hard for the Signer to keep up with the Reader Leader if she is going too fast) and then then the Laser Pointer Person kind of is the metronome to keep it all slow also.
I did that yesterday and found myself without a job so I just went over to the window and sat on a ledge and watched the class read together. It was kind of weird, really. But I got to step in and clear up stuff if there was confusion. But there really wasn’t any confusion because the kids knew the reading so well because they had just created the story in the three classes before that (PQon MondayA , Story on T/W and Reading on Thursday in this case).
(We don’t have school today – it is the district pre-test assessment scoring day and right now I get to ride downtown to North High School and see my friends Diana and Paul and Reuben and all of them TCI Cowboys to spend the day scoring the writing assesments. It’ll be fun, except for the traditional teachers who are now greatly outnumbered in our district and whose kids can’t write for shit.)
The other times the kids teach the class is in WTC and all I have to do there is say a French sentence once every few minutes and they take care of the rest.
This jobs thing is pretty cool, like really cool. I certainly have to work less on the two activities described herein. I have noticed that, in general this year, a breakthrough year for me thanks to you guys, the jobs and jGR have combined to give me a much better feeling of simplicity than I’ve ever had. My LCD/doc camera cart is not even all tangled up with wires. How cool is that?