So, one of my new (school) year resolutions is to improve the pace of blog postings. My usual pace has been one post per year, it seems. It shouldn’t be too tough to meet that goal. All I need is one more after this. : )
Keeping up a higher pace, though, is the real worry. Classes haven’t even started yet, and if history is any teacher, my non-work writing time will evaporate quickly.
It’s not that I don’t like to write. I love to write. Consistent with my advice to students, I’m starting this in my reflective journal. That journal, a Google Doc, currently numbers 138 pages of raw, top-of-the-dome text, and that only counts this year’s installment. I decided to start a new document back in January, because the last version, dating back to 2016 and weighing in a 400+ pages was taking forever to load on the screen. Apparently 400 pages is when you start to kill Google’s ability to match the speed of Microsoft Word.
So, let me talk about journaling in this installment. Why do I do it? Partly to keep my mind at bay. Partly because I enjoy the feeling of being in the writing groove. Partly because I enjoy looking back at old pieces of writing. And partly because I got a bit nutty about maintaining and sustaining a steady workout/life routine “program” during the weirdness of pandemic era teaching.
The main reason I journal so much, though, is because I try to practice what I preach. I started that last mammoth journal back in 2016, because I got tired of my students not updating their own class journals and decided it was better to lead by example. With each passing year, I’ve gotten better at monitoring and comment student journal work (part of the class social contract is that they share the journals to me with comment access in exchange for me not sharing or blabbing about the contents).
As good as I’ve gotten at the journal monitoring, there always comes a time midway through the term when I simply don’t have time to check or grade in a fashion that truly reflects the work demonstrated. Not surprisingly, that’s about the same time most journals start to peter out. This spring, in the first semester of my current Theory of Knowledge course, I decided to fight that tendency. I made it a regular part of the class routine to do five journal checks at the start of each class, whether online or in person. Not only did that give students time to catch up on missing entries, I also found it worked well as a quote unquote “bell ringer” activity.
Which was weird in its own way. In years’ past, I always treated the first five minutes of class as prime motivation time. It all went back to my first years as a teacher, a time when I really could only guarantee full engagement at the start of a period and even then, only if had something weird, offbeat or majorly compelling to grab kids by the collar.
My TOK group is pretty motivated to begin with. Starting the class with five random journal checks (roughly a 5-10 minute time investment on my part) had the weird effect of making my class period the rare moment in the day when students actually had time to cool their minds down and think. Around about May, or roughly two-thirds of the way through the NYC spring term, I felt the usual urge to shift to a different routine. As I often tell the kids, sometimes it’s the teacher who gets bored with the lesson quicker than the kids. Taking note of how many journal entries were getting longer and more interesting, however, I decided I would be a fool to kill the momentum, so I resolved to take it all the way to June.
Because my students also put their journals in Google Docs, I can check the Classroom folder and get a quick look at who’s updated and how recently. This summer, I’m proud to say, I had at least ten students updating journals compared to one or two over the previous summers (and only recent summers at that).
I make it a policy to have a college recommendation ready for any kid who updates their journal over the summer, so it looks like I have my work cut out for me over the weekend. In the meantime, I’m looking at a totally new topic on my program — Pre-Calculus—and am already wracking my brain on how to make journal checks a regular routine in that class as well.
…which seems like a pretty good topic for the next post. Stay tuned..
The Trench Periscope 