As people get to know each other they learn more about each other. I didn’t know that Robert Harrell was a pianist OR had a paper route as a kid. I didn’t know that he used to be one of those guys dressed in knight’s armor storming in on a horse doing battle with someone else while people had dinner (hence his name here Le Chevalier de l’Ouest).
I didn’t know that Chris Stoltz was a research junkie. That piece, the comment he made yesterday, was powerful. Honestly, we don’t have anybody I know of who can go around and grab that kind of stuff out of the air and share it with others except for Robert and Jody.
Thank you Chris and I would like to republish that comment as an article soon, with your permission. We need to be able to access ANYTHING WE CAN FIND on the research in a category and this comment turned article will be a big help to many of us as we continue to deal with people who still think in the old way.
So this is the way we should assign jobs in our classrooms. We find out something about someone and we ask don’t tell them if they will do the job. This is a key point. Blaine names people and I say don’t name them but let their names emerge organically and ASK THEIR PERMISSION if they want that name.
Same for jobs. This may be holding some of us back on our classroom management. We now know that classroom management can be dramatically increased via jGR and the jobs, but I had a thought this morning that many of us blow the jobs part when we ASSIGN jobs because it is just another assignment to the kid.
Leah asked in the forum last night if it is OK to assign a job to a particular kid because we feel that they would be good at it. Absolutely if it is the right kid but I think we still need to ask permission in general. Or if more than one kid wants the job we have the class vote, or the audition, whatever.
In my view a lot of the problems in education are caused by a teacher, fearful that he is not doing the right thing by the book, tries to control too much of the constantly emerging natural process and, thus ignoring where the energy of the class is going, shuts it down.
So now I need to ask Robert if indeed I have his permission to call him the Chevalier de l’Ouest, because I never did. And I should ask Chris in Vancouver if we can call him Research Man, or the Canadian Mountie, or the Canadian Mounted Research Policeman or something like that.
The names may not stick and they may change. It’s all a big part of a big process. But I like the idea of finding names for each other here. It would be fun. We have chill and Le Chevalier, and I once referred to Jody as Queen of the Western Forces or something like that. It’s fun.
We all have such talents here in this group. It’s amazing. Now this leads into another point. Send in your bios and include some talents you may have. Maybe they will lead to names. I will publish another article on how I want to deal with the bios after I publish this one.