I planned today's AP lesson before the grand jury in the Michael Brown case handed down the decision to not indict. However, the decision sadly and precisely mirrored what I wanted them to talk about. 

I started class by reading to the students, again, the closing of James Baldwin's magnificent essay, "Notes of a Native Son." In part, the essay narrates Baldwin's experience of his father's death, set against the backdrop of a race riot in Harlem. He writes: 

Then I gave them their Over-Thanksgiving work: read the chapter in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell which details the Diallo (41 shots) case. But the bulk of the class centered on a big, full-circle conversation around these two questions:

• What level of blame should we assign the individuals who see evil happening, but do nothing? Are they in any way responsible for the evil itself?
• How much blame should individual members of a mob bear for the actions of the group?
  

And we talked through and teased out nuance. 

For over an hour. 

We returned again and again to the big-picture tension--is our higher responsibility to our moral/ethical beliefs, or is our higher responsibility to self-preservation? The general consensus? That the higher responsibility should be to our own ethical standard, but when it came down to it, most people preserve themselves first. We applied this to Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, bullying situations, and even the Biblical story of the disciples denying Christ before the Crucifixion. In all of those texts/situations, the individuals knew (either during or immediately afterwards) that they should have said something to the persecutors, even if it meant their own deaths as well. But most people would have done exactly what the stories say: they (and likely I) would ignore our ethical precepts in honor of saving our own lives. 

This sets up one of our final units of the semester, for when we come back from Thanksgiving: How Do We Respond To Injustice (even if we don't think we can do anything about it)? 

I look forward to these conversations, especially as we weave The Things They Carried into it, and begin to discuss how the baggage we carry with us affects how we choose to interact with the world. 

In the mornings, I teach AP English Language, which is fundamentally a class about argumentation. We learn about the rhetorical triangle, using good evidence, finding patterns in the arguments of others, analysis, and a bevy of other things. Today's lesson was to watch Hank Green's short video on the mass incarceration of many American citizens and figure out his argument (and the warrants underlying it). Then we were going to talk about what we can infer about the speaker by the argument he makes. 

Then we were going to do something completely different, but we never really got there. The conversation about the video turned into a full-on debate about the efficacy of the prison system and whether convicted felons should get second chances to be able to get jobs and support themselves/their families. We also connected the video to the one we watched yesterday, which talked (in part) about the development of the prefrontal cortex in teenagers and how that affects impulse control until people are 25 years old. 

The argument was good, for sure. I would even call it tense and electric--the best kind of debate. And when I plan these things more thoroughly, I put structures in place to require almost everyone to participate. However, days like this are all too rare, when kids latch onto something and want to talk and talk about it, and sometimes in my zeal to plan and stay the course, I have all-too-often steered the tangents and conversations back to REAL ACADEMIC WORK and not allowed space for thoughts to develop and unfurl and ramble a little bit.

It was awesome. 

And it was a little bit of a reminder to practice what I preach- that learning is messy, it takes awhile, and it doesn't necessarily happen on a regimented schedule, at least not all the time. 

This is going to be a quick post, but it's something that hit me as I was walking out of a meeting, and I have learned that I need to write them down before I forget. 

I was having a conversation with Kyle Wood (a 5th grade teacher who is awesome, and you need to check his stuff out), about video making. My kids have tried to do all iterations of videos: with puppets and without; making video SparkNotes of chapters in Of Mice and Men and videos about How To Fix Your Terrible Grammar. And they are largely mediocre, if we're being perfectly honest. There are funny moments and instructive moments, but it has proven very difficult to be both entertaining and to communicate concrete concepts. For example, they have grammar videos that teach the concept well, but are kind of dry and dull; they also have videos that are entertaining, but at the same time, people watch their videos, laugh, and don't learn the concept they were supposed to learn. The lede is buried. 


There are so many "non-academic" skills they need to be successful in this type of video production. They need to be able to shoot clear videos and edit them. They need to be competent puppeteers. They need to be able to write engaging scripts that communicate personalities. 


Oh, and they need to understand their content well enough to communicate it to others. Which, in many cases, forces them to step up their research skills as well. 


The issue is this: how much time do we need to spend allowing them to revise their original videos? How well do the videos need to be revised before they are made available to a public audience? Is the process the point, even if the videos don't all succeed in doing what they claim to do? 


And how much time do we need to spend giving them space to learn video editing skills, etc? Or is this a try/fail/do it again, but with a different project? Maybe it's better to just get on to the next project. 


I am struggling with this (and finding time for ALL OF THE THINGS). If you have any ideas, please share on Twitter or in the comments.