HOCW: Back to School Night

First, please let me know some information.
Dear everybody who's interested,

If you are reading this in my classroom, thanks so much for coming out to meet us all, I know how hard it is to organize and make time to attend this kind of thing. I appreciate it. If you're viewing this at home, I am sorry to have missed an opportunity to meet you, but appreciate you taking the time to read this.

What I need to tell you about our class -

I honestly believe that this class can be really important to your student's future, no matter what field or career they choose. Literacy skills are the most important academic skills that a person can learn for nearly any field of work, and benefit people enormously. So I take our class very seriously.

When I think about doing anything is our class, I ask these questions:

1. It is difficult enough to grow students, but not so difficult that students cannot succeed?
2. Does learning this (in this way) benefit the student in high school/college/career/life?
3. Is the way that I have designed the lesson let the student practice a lot and minimize the time I spend lecturing or explaining?
4. Is the lesson or reading I am considering something that is connected to the real world? Is it current?
5. How can I teach or explain this or design this lesson so the skill can be used outside my classroom?
6. Will this interest my students who are giving it their best effort?

These questions help me decide everything I do. I have a longer, more detailed explanation of how I make classroom decisions about everything if you click here, but I also just think that it's important to tell people how you make decisions, because if they share your values, they can simply trust you to do your best. Please read the document attached to the link if you want to learn more about the philosophy behind my actions.

This year we will explore six big topics in our six six-week units (get that?). They are -
1. Learning and School;
2. Values, Rules, and Crime;
3. Groups, Technology, and Power;
4. Past, Present, and Future;
5. Beauty, Art, and Artists; and
6. Mother(land), Father(land), Home(land).


Readings have been selected from many different sources, but include the novels The Giver, Tuck Everlasting, The Wave, My Brother Sam Is Dead, and The Outsiders. Our short story selection proudly features stories by many different authors, including Langston Hughes, Walter Dean Myers, William Carlos Williams, Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, Saki, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Mark Twain, Laurence Yep, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ray Bradbury. While I do not expect everyone to like everything, I have not had a student yet that didn't find something that they really enjoyed in our class. In addition, I have drawn dozens of readings from magazines, newspapers, and nonfiction books to help students learn the special structure and vocabulary of nonfiction text.

Grading - We will issue four grades a week - a knowledge, comprehension, application, and effort grade. These will be weighted to match the departments grading policy. Each week, we will gather together the work and see if a student has mastered the skill that is the focus for that week - if they have shown that they know it, understand it, and can apply it. Since we try to expose students to so many readings each week that are of different levels of complexity, we understand that every student might not understand everything, and so we award the effort grade to students who have clearly expended enough effort to either master the skill or to show that they have tried to.

Each check is pass/fail - there are no partial credits - a student either knows it well enough or does not. To meet this high standard for achievement, though, we are willing to grade anything at any time, which means that there are no penalties for late work, a student may retake any assessment as many times as he or she needs to, and that any missing check may be made up at any time. We really want your student to focus on learning these important skills, and so we don't think it's a good idea to give up if it takes a little longer.

Class Rules

1. Everybody who is a member of our class is expected to take their Language Arts education seriously. Everybody in our class is an intelligent, capable student, and is expected to act like it.
2. Everybody who is a member of our class will treat everybody else with the respect that they should - we are all fellow serious students.
3. There are many objects in our room - the school's, mine, other students'. Any object in our room may be used by anyone to complete work. If you need something to do your assignment, you may look through my desk. If you want to borrow a book, let me know and borrow it. In return, you agree to be respectful of all the objects in the room. They are shared amongst us.
4. As a member of our class, I will follow all the rules that I make. If I need you all to be silent, that means that I cannot talk, either. However, as a member of our group that takes our mission very seriously, I am uncompromisingly honest when a student is hurting our classroom's success. Please understand that and try your best. You are welcome to criticize or question me at any time as well.