The teen years are full of drama and staring at one’s self in the mirror – for hours. It’s also about socializing. When I was a teen, I remember sneaking up to the den to make a covert phone call to a boy late on a school night. We had a code: one ring and hang up meant call me. It drove my parents nuts.
Now as a parent, I race my daughter to the bathroom in the morning and I feel around her pillow at night for the contraband cell phone.
May means a lot of things. It’s the unofficial field trip month: just try reserving a school bus in May and you’ll find out just how many field trips occur in your district. May is test month. Students take state standardized tests and AP tests in May. They’re stressed until the middle of the month. May is senior month with another senior activity every other day: the senior banquet, the senior field trip, the senior graduation practice, the seniors’ last baseball game or track meet. It’s concert season, it’s the rainy season, and kids are squirrely. You’re packing up, tearing down, collecting, cataloging, figuring grades, and making sure your seniors are on track for passing your class.
May is also project month. We have just weeks left of school; no one wants to lecture students who squirm in their seats and watch the clock. Better to keep them engaged with the content and let them direct their own learning with a project.
Like it or not, what happens in cyberspace doesn’t stay in cyberspace. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 15 percent of our students have received a nude or nearly nude photo or video of someone they know. Four percent are sending sexual photos or videos of themselves.
As teachers we know that the schoolhouse gate doesn’t serve as a barrier to information from the real world. The sexual text messages and instant messages (sexting) our teens send to one another during their online evenings can create a lot of trouble during the offline school day.
PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking site from the St. Petersburg Times that brought you the Truth-o-Meter during the 2008 presidential election, has posted a new device for tracking President Obama’s 510 campaign promises: The Obameter.
As of this writing, the economic downturn is the third longest since 1945. Families are stretching their dollars further and kids are less likely to wear the latest tennis shoes or play the latest video game.
We’re all tightening our belts, but some of us do it better than others. Financial literacy is important for students to understand, not just during economic recessions, but for positive life-long spending habits.
In the 2005 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, researchers found that 70 percent of secondary school teachers think that the relationship between parents and teachers is adversarial. Twenty percent of teachers found their relationships with parents to be somewhat or very unsatisfying.
“It seems obvious that parents and teachers should work together,” said Suzanne Tingley, author of Dealing with Difficult Parents. “After all, both parents and teachers have the child’s best interest at heart. Both want the child to be successful and both understand that the child has a greater chance of being successful when the home and the school work together. Unfortunately, despite their shared goals, parents and teachers sometimes run into conflict about how to reach those goals.”
Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event.
November of 2006 was a “Blues Fest,” according to the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa.
You might not remember, but that was the election when the democrats won back a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.
Psephophobia is the fear of voting.
Maybe voters are afraid of the small booths, the machines, or the hanging chad. Perhaps young voters just don’t know what to expect.
Whatever their fear, a 2003 study from Representative Democracy in America: Voices of the People found that only 66 percent of 15- 26-year-olds thought voting was part of being a good citizen.
My new favorite site for in-depth politics is from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato. Sabato calls his site the Crystal Ball and bills itself as the Web’s most accurate political analysis. I’m not qualified to judge that, but I do think the site would be useful in a classroom.
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