Number 21

Langley Sea Wall (photo Marc Smith)

Highlights of the first (short) week of school, aka Thursday and Friday, September 4th and 5th:
Amidst a chaos of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time computers Bergquist's American Studies Blocks (1st and 2nd period, 5th and 6th period) were able, virtually to a man, to create both Gmail and Moodle (online course website) accounts. The kids, in other words, showed real problem solving skill given an authentic problem situation; the more savvy stepped up to assist the less technical, motivation was high all round, it was messy, it was real. Fun for the adults? Maybe not so much at first but as one learns to roll with it and sees the kids really engaged it felt better.

My two classes, English 8 and Publications, proved to be inhabited by a nice group of kids as was the circulating assessment of this class from their 7th grade year. In English we kicked off with a possibly over-the-top extended metaphor lesson involving a chainsaw and a fairly hefty section of Douglas Fir trunk. This activity is under study as to its viability and future use. We listened to a reading of the letter to parents about the expectations and curriculum of this class which was emailed later in the day to nearly all parents. Friday we began the construction of a hand-made journal for general use throughout the quarter (we will make a new one at the start of each quarter) and simultaneously wrote a reflection on the first day of school on one of the, as yet, unbound pages of said journal.

In Publications there was a fairly lengthy discussion of the nature of this production class and the implications of same for the members of the class. This class lives or dies based on real business requirements like profit and loss and the degree to which we can meet the needs and satisfy the interests of our market, the students of LMS. On Friday the class formed small groups and took photos of objects around the school after a short introduction to some basic rules of good photography. The class is large for the kind of multiple simultaneous activities envisioned, its a logistic challenge, and will demand levels of independence and responsibility not yet fully developed in this age group. We hope to break into a yearbook group, a video group, and a blog group very soon with a rotation through these during the year.

Implementation of tech levy funding for student workstations has not picked up much steam as yet but I think we will start to see a significant surge in actual machines in front of kids sometime this quarter and after; we need this to happen because even our newest workstations are now over 5 years old. The majority of these beasts work but they do not work well and with 25 to 30 kids in a room, believe me, you do not need to be hand-holding the computers.

The new library management software known as Destiny from the Follett Corporation is working very well and will be working a lot better when the students are uploaded to the system.
Great potential for searching the LMS library, and indeed all the district library collections, from school, home, anywhere you have an internet connection, (cell phone?). Kids or parents can finally really search for the right print or web resource easily. The software also enables a top ten list of most popular books (most checked out by students at each school), pictures of covers, complete records for each title, summaries and the actual text of the first several pages of many books, and many other features, probably that I will discover someday not too far in the future.
Now if we can get a whole bunch of shiny new books and get those kids into the system we will be rolling indeed.

Seismic assessment is in and, I think, available on the district web page somewhere. That should be interesting reading.

Adventure Ed is, I think, on track for Washington Coast Hike, Santa Barbara/Channel Islands, San Francisco/Point Reyes, Washington Coast again, with a Mount Pilchuck day hike in there somewhere, during the next two semesters.
Stay tuned.