bookpost: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Published on 23 April 2011

I’m not a huge fan of science fiction. I picked this up at a book sale because I know it’s a seminal novel within the genre and because I knew I would be lecturing on Blade Runner this winter at the Film Archive. I was ready for a futuristic world where a bounty hunter tries to kill of renegade androids and has mixed feelings about it; what I was not expecting and really enjoyed was the cultural context created for the novel, with Mercerism and the obsession with owning an animal. (It certainly explains a thing or two about the film.) I have to say I didn’t love the plotting — it drags in places and the ending is so ambiguous I couldn’t quite sort it out. On the other hand, it offers the kind of social criticism all of the best dystopias offer (although this doesn’t qualify as one) and the characterization is quite rich, much more so than BR, with which it was impossible not to compare. I really enjoyed it and I would like to read more of his work.

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Mrs Dalloway, student interest and feminism

Published on 21 April 2011

Several years ago, I taught Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to my IB Diploma Higher Level English class on a whim. We had just finished TS Eliot, which they found challenging but rewarding, and I thought it would be interesting to head in the same direction with a novel. It was not an easy process. They found the style and content off-putting and the students were hostile. As we went through the reading and I gave them some concepts to anchor their reading, it got better, and the necessity of preparing for oral commentaries overtook them well enough, but I thought I would not teach it again.

But then I got a note from a student at graduation. She was a good student, but not a great one, having taken Higher Level A1 English because she needed the Higher level in something. Here is the relevant section:

I’m so glad you gave us Mrs Dalloway. I can’t stop thinking about it. The ideas there are amazing. I feel like I see something now that I couldn’t see before and nobody else sees, like I see how the world really works and how I can live. I feel like reading that book has been the most important thing that’s happened to me.

So I decided to stick with it. And each year, most of my HL students hate it in the beginning and embrace by the end.

I’ve read a lot about how education should allow students to explore their passions, advocating for student-choice reading lists for instance. I can see the attraction, and I understand the argument. At the same time, the interests and passions of students are limited by their own experience and by the natural conservatism of most teenagers. If we allow students to focus on their own interests and never push them to explore other ideas and texts, we end up isolating them in their own prejudices and contexts. Not a single student ever would choose Mrs Dalloway, a stream of consciousness novel about a middle-aged woman having a party in 1923 London. And yet so many of the students who have endured the novel have broadened their perspectives and been introduced to ideas they had never considered. That is an essential element of learning that I cannot see abandoning.

Even so, I was not excited about doing Mrs D this year. My Higher Level class consists of six boys and one girl, an unusual reversal of the usual ratio. I’ve taught most of these boys since grade 9, and I know that they glaze over every time gender issues come up. But then I thought, these are very clever young men who will go off to do amazing things: they need to come to terms wiyth feminism, not just laughing it off as someone else’s issue. They should learn the vocabulary and be able to wade into the issues with some clarity. They may not become feminists because they read the novel, but they should be required to take the ideas seriously, even if it is against their interests and passions.

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English literature anthologies

Published on 20 April 2011

Someone on Twitter had asked for some recommendations, and I realized this would not work in 140 characters. We tend to use lots of smaller collections that we can dip in and out of rather than a larger, more expensive reader that will dictate our curriculum. So here’s what I use:

poetry

Generally, I put together my own anthologies of poetry for students to use from online sources. But we have a few that I use from time to time:

Perrine’s Sound and Sense

Perrine's Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (9th Edition)

This is college level with a wide range of poems and detailed descriptions of techniques and methods of reading and analyzing poetry. I use it mostly with MYP5 and Diploma students to review techniques.

Poems from the Past (Cambridge School Anthologies)

Poems from the Past (Cambridge School Anthologies)

I have a colleague who uses this with MYP 1-2. It’s quite traditional but covers the techniques well and selects accessible poems from before the 20th century.

Poems 2 (New Longman Literature 14-18)

Poems 2 thumbnail

I really like this collection and I use it all the time for individual poems.

short fiction

Again, I have over the years scanned and found copies of stories I like to use, but here are some anthologies:

Working with Short Stories (Cambridge)

Working with Short Stories

Good stories, good activities.

Global Tales (Longman Imprint Books)

Global Tales (Longman Imprint Books)

The questions and activities are not great, but the stories are wonderful and really varied. This was the basis of a MYP3 unit at some point.

non-fiction

The non-fiction anthologies I use most are no longer in print, the Oxford Literature Resources on Autobiography and Reportage. However, the other alternative is Granta:

For older students, these collections are amazing: I have used them with MYP4-5 and A2 Diploma students.

Models for Writers (Bedford / St. Martins)

Models for Writers

Just a fantastic book. It has short essays organized in a way to identify different elements of the writing process. Great essays, good commentary. My companion for the last 18 years.

historical anthology

Fields of Vision: Literature in the English Language (Longman)

If you are wanting a comprehensive study of English language literature, this one is flexible and accessible. I don’t use it with the class, but I do as a resource of my own.

That’s what I use. Any others?

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Anne Frank, the Holocaust and Affective Learning

Published on 19 April 2011

My MYP2 (grade 7) students have been reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, but we didn’t talk much about the Holocaust itself until today when they read the afterward. Is that strange? A little background first.

I struggled with an interesting approach to the diary as I remember hating it as a middle school student. My feeling has always been that it is an important book because it existed more than because of its content, kind of like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the poetry of Edmund Spencer. I reread it over the summer, and while I found it compelling, I still wasn’t sure what to do with it. I actually planned to drop it from the syllabus, but I had published a reading list at the beginning of the year, and several of the kids asked me about it repeatedly.

I was thinking about it one day, and I thought, what is valuable about this book besides being a historical document? And the answer is the amount of insight and reflection she has about herself and her situation. And then I started thinking about that issue: how much is her and how much is her situation? A lot of what Anne writes is totally typical for a teenage girl, but her situation — her historical context and her physical reality — is completely atypical, and the most interesting moments is when these clash. And so I drew a little Venn for myself:

and started reading it again with this in mind, and I found that the diary opened up in a totally different way for me. In my reading, in the beginning of the diary, the two are very separate; by the end, there is little just about Anne and loads in the middle space. When thinking about a guiding question, the issue was not about what the diary says about the Holocaust, but what the diary says about an individual and her context, and to what degree you can separate those out. And so my basic planning looked like this:

Area of Interaction: Environments. How does an environment or a situation determine one’s individuality? Can they be separated? If the individual stays in that environment a long time, does that influence grow?

Significant Concept: A person is shaped by her situation.

Unit Question: How does a person’s situation affect the way he or she behaves and sees herself?

Summative Assessment: Choose one aspect of Anne’s experience: her relationship with parents, with Peter, her identity as a Jew, her education, etc.) and write an explanation of how much that was her and how much it was her situation. Anchored on quotations from the diary, in the form of a bulletin board display.

I know that the concept kind of sucks: it is too broad, and I actually need to teach it once and see how it fleshes out to get the wording better. And the assessment is a little weird right now, but when I set it up it will make more sense.

So I gave them a little introduction to the diary that would help them make sense of the context. (I was on paternity leave when they started, so this was not the best learning on earth, but it did the job.) I also selected passages for us to read just so we could get through it in a few weeks rather than a few months. (I  know that’s controversial, but I really, really hated this book at their age.) Those who wanted to read more could, and those who were less interested could get the point.

Anne didn’t know much detail about the mechanics of the Nazi’s treatment of Jews beyond her own experience, and so it wasn’t very important to our study of the diary. And that is why we hadn’t talked about the nitty-gritty of the Holocaust more until now, and we only did so because they had buckets of questions: Why did Hitler hate the Jews so much? Why did they move from camp to camp so much? Why did some of them have to labor and others were just killed? and so on.

Now I am fairly well read on the Holocaust, and I have read everything Primo Levi ever wrote, and I taught the rise of Hitler as a part of IB Diploma History a few years ago, so I was able to deal with their questions directly and with detail. And as I was describing the methodology of murder in a death camp, I looked around the room and realized that my twenty twelve year-olds were in various stages of shock. It is historical fact to me, but it was the bursting of a bubble for some of them. Are people really that wicked? Could this thing really have happened? And so I stopped and did a quick ‘What I Know / What I Feel’ writing task about the content of the discussion, and this allowed us to get a few of their feelings out there and discuss them as a class. It was a good reminder to me that the presentation of new worldviews and perspectives needs some pastoral care along with it.

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bookpost: The Age of Absurdity by Michael Foley

Published on 18 April 2011

I’ve read three books without posts, so I’ll try to catch up in the next few days.

I can’t remember why I had this book — I think it was a gift from a colleague or student. I would never had bought it on my own. By the cover it looks like an Old Crank book, where someone complains about how crappy the world is with its new-fangled whatnots, and so on. And in some ways, it is.

But it is more of an Alain de Botton -style review of philosophy, looking at how thinkers have prescribed a path to happiness and how modern western culture, with its emphasis on consumerism and entitlement, makes it hard to apply those prescriptions:

Here are the concepts that keep turning up in philosophy, religious teaching, literature, psychology and neuroscience: personal responsibility, autonomy, detatchment, understanding, mindfulness, transcendence, acceptance of difficulty, ceaseless striving and constant awareness of mortality. (68)

Foley promotes a lifestyle of contemplation and personal responsibility, at once radical and reactionary, where we turn away from society and embrace silence but at the same time avoid self-absorption or alienation, supported though scientific research and philosophers from Buddha to Nietzsche.While I didn’t always agree with him, I found his central argument compelling (as I am a bit of a crank myself), and it did invite me to examine my own life. For example, the chapter ‘The Absurdity of Work’ made me laugh out loud, but also made me think about my career and how I can achieve autonomy and detachment and still be effective. He had some imminently practical advice:

[S]urrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos. (177)

I also loved this:

It is shocking and profoundly regrettable, but, apparently, sales of oranges are falling steadily because people can no longer be bothered to peel them. As soon as I read this I began buying oranges more frequently and eating them with greater pleasure. Now I peel an orange very slowly, deliberately, voluptuously, above all defiantly, as a riposte to an age that demands war without casualties, public services without taxes, rights without obligations, celebrity without achievement, sex without relationship, running shoes without running, coursework without work and sweet grapes without seeds. (112)

As a teacher, I want to offer my students the opportunity to dig into this rich life of contemplation and struggle, to sacrifice the shortcut and the quick answer for transcendence and understanding. We advocate too much for giving the student what they want, not challenging them to learn beyond their own passions, stroking their ids to the extent that they don’t move beyond immediate desires. Students want freedom to do what they want, but the greatest happiness comes from discipline and difficulty. As Foley says, ‘Freedom is thin’ (137). We need more, and this book gives some direction to where we might find it.

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Teaching English on 40 hours a week

Published on 14 April 2011

Teaching as work

When I was single and in my twenties, teaching was a lifestyle rather than a job. I would stay at school for hours after the students left and still take home work, marking student work on the bus and planning while watching tv. I coached, I worked with the drama department, I met students for lunch and coffee, I served on development committees, mostly without getting paid for it.

Two events changed my attitude. The first was moving to Finland and dating my now-wife. Finns have a very different attitude toward work compared to Americans. My wife was a designer for a prestigious interior design firm, and she never brought work home or worked overtime. They don’t do that here. She thought it was very odd that I didn’t distinguish my work time from my personal time. Realizing my attitude toward teaching was cultural helped me see the opportunity to change it.

A more significant event was the birth of my first sons. Having twins made my home-time precious. I didn’t have the time to mark work at home or spend extra hours at school. I needed to streamline my process, be smart about how I spent my time and basically work my contract. Some six years later, now with four boys, those needs have not changed. I can say without equivocation that I can offer an excellent English program to my students on forty hours a week.

Before I get into the details, let me do some rebuttal:

‘How can you limit your efforts in helping your students learn? Isn’t learning more than a 40 hour a week process?’ etc.

Yes it is, and I hope my students will learn beyond the classroom, and I can structure my class to encourage them to do so. However, I need to learn independently of my students. Too many teachers only learn about what they teach, not expanding or broadening out. I want and need the time to explore the margins of my own subject and other subjects altogether.

More importantly, my children have learning to do. One of my six year-olds is currently fascinated by the planets, so I want to spend an hour with him constructing his own guide to the planets. My other six year-old is working on a comic book about his toy dog, and I want to help him work that out. None of this is homework: it’s their own curiosity. My three year-old wants to read and read and read with me, and that is crucial. That’s how I will spend my afternoons and evenings, not putting in ten hour work days.

‘If everybody just worked their contract, would the students get what they need?’

I think they would: my students like my classes, and they leave prepared for whatever they are doing next. I regularly get emails from university students telling how well prepared they are for college-level writing, and many correspond with me about their interests in literature, culture and language more generally.

But let’s suppose they are missing out on something. That means that the school system is failing to provide the resources necessary for students to learn effectively and demands that the teachers to make up the difference. I think this is a primary model of education in America, and most teachers enable the system by working for free. It undermines the professional status of the teacher, and it maintains the under-resourced system. If we keep working beyond our contract, it will never change. If we work beyond our contracts, we are our own scabs.

What do I do?

Planning ahead is crucial, and I do a lot of planning in the summer holidays, laying out the school year by units and identifying how I will assess what with each unit. I change that as I go, but having a plan up front allows me to be flexible in a meaningful way.

The biggest use of time for an English teacher is the assessment of student work, and so the biggest issue has to be streamlining and reducing the amount of work I assess outside of class. The homework I give consists almost entirely of reading and finishing summative assessment tasks, like essays or other text productions. For the reading, I can do quick in-class quizzes that take me five minutes to check, not for a grade, but to help students (and parents) see the connection between doing the reading and completing the assignments.

Of the formative assessment my students do, very little of it is assessed outside of class. Instead, that work, mostly done in class, builds skills necessary to the summative assessment task and usually involves part of the process of that assessment task. Because the work is being done in class, I can do over-the-shoulder assessments. Usually, though, I am looking at self and peer assessments of that formative work, still in class. Students don’t always see that this formative work is necessary, but they quickly learn that they need to apply themselves on the in-class ‘unit work’ to be able to succeed with the ‘end of unit work’.

Over the years, I have built up a range of in-class activities that involve  sharing and recording ideas about a text (usually read at home), and those ideas end up in their notebooks or, now that we all have laptops, in a Moodle forum or on a G-doc. Again, the point is for them to create resources for the summative assessment done at the end of the unit rather than for me to create work for its own sake. So, for instance, if I do journaling (and I rarely do), the point is not for me to mark every entry, but for them to create ‘rough drafts’ of ideas they might polish into a publishable form. The students have an idea of what the assessment will be from the beginning, so they can see the connections themselves.

For the actual summative assessments, whether they be essays or creative pieces or some other sort of performance, we work on the process together in class, and I only assess the final, published version outside of class. I am assessing the product, not the process: we can assess the process and understand how the process led to the product separately and together. We have class time for peer and self assessment of drafts and even one-on-one conferences with me, usually targeting on specific issues that either I or they identify.

When I am assessing that work, the use of specific rubrics that identify key concepts helps me target those skills I want them to learn. The MYP criteria are very helpful for me as there are only three criteria and I need not use all three (although I usually do). I do not use editing marks for language errors, merely identifying some examples of those errors. My goal is not to correct their work — it is published and it is their work, after all — but to help them learn how to edit their own work. Using Moodle to collect and return work helps me as well, and I annotate student work using MS Word comments. (Comments on Google Docs aren’t good enough.)

Disclaimer

Yes, I have smaller classes than most of you; the smaller classes give me time to produce models of work for students and work with them individually more often. Yes, I teach highly motivated students keen to do well for the most part, but the ease of classroom management is met by the demands of their ambition. Yes, I do sometimes work overtime, especially writing comments for reporting periods, parent conferences and whatnot. But I think I have found a way to be a full-time classroom teacher for the full span of my career. Every year I am offered chances to leave the classroom either part-time or full-time, but I love being with the students rather than administrating or facilitating or supervising. If I can manage the workload, I can do what I really love to do and what I’m really good at: teaching.

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Why I like the IB Diploma

Published on 22 March 2011

A few years ago, I got an email from a friend. He’s American, and after teaching in California and New York, had ended up in the UK, teaching A-level English. His school had announced that they would adopt the IB Diploma Programme, and knowing that I had been teaching in the Diploma for several years, wanted to know what I thought about it. I found an archived copy of my response the other day, and I thought it might be interesting for others. I have made a few changes to reflect some shifts in my thinking.

I will confess to being a big fan of the Diploma, to the point that I would make teaching in the programme one of my highest priorities in choosing another teaching job. I have been teaching A1, A2 and B English, but I’ll assume you’d be teaching A1 (mother tongue) English. Here’s what I like:

  • The course is designed by teachers. The IB solicits advice and questions from teachers as they design the courses, and although they also may be considering other factors as well, I feel like they are reasonably responsive (as compared to the College Board and the AP exams, for instance). After every exam, they ask teachers to evaluate the exam questions and texts. It is still easy to see the IB as a monolithic exam preparation board (especially if you choose not to participate in the feedback), and they could do better at being connected to the programme’s teachers, but compared to the other systems I’ve interacted with they are relatively transparent and interactive.
  • The content is flexible. Rather than prescribing a set list of texts for all students, the IB prescribes a large selection of authors from whose works a teacher can choose; teachers at the same school need not even select the same texts. While the list may not always be as comprehensive as one would want, it has allowed me to select texts based on my own expertise and the interests and skills of my students. In addition, 3-4 of the texts need not be on the prescribed list at all, which has allowed me to teach detective novels and a popular Finnish novel in translation, for instance. Many teachers allow students some choice in the works they study.
  • The assessments are strong. The exam papers, oral assessments and assignments challenge students to develop higher level reading, thinking and response skills. In other words, when I am ‘teaching the test’ I am usually teaching skills that I want students to learn rather than nonsense they’ll never use beyond the assessment. There is no multiple choice. 50% of the assessment is done before the exam papers. 30% is oral. One of the oral assessments and one of the exam papers require close readings, the paper being a previously unseen text. The Individual Oral Commentary is an amazing experience through which every literature teacher should put themselves. Both exam papers allow some choice of question and generally require students to make their own choices and develop their own readings rather than conform to an established reading. As a result, the external assessment and moderation of internal assessment are sometimes not as consistent as one would like, but that’s the price to be paid for more authentic assessment.
  • The criteria for assessment allow for a range of styles and responses. The criteria do demand organization and structure, but they do not define what that might look like, so the traditional thesis-driven essay is one choice but not required. While most students will want formulas to work with for their assessments, they will not be penalized for developing their own strategies — in fact, if it’s effective, they will be rewarded. There are no checklists or a need for the student to memorize or guess at the content of the criteria: they are qualitative, and again, they focus on what most English teachers would find important for a college-preparatory English course.
  • The IB Diploma has a philosophy to it that encourages life-long learning, not just success on an exam. Some schools ignore the learner profile and the other philosophical aims of the IBO, but in doing so I think they cheat their students, running them through a points factory rather than helping them develop the skills and attributes that they will be able to use within their academic career and beyond.

I have criticisms of the programme as well: the focus on the formalist approach is outdated, there is too much focus on comparison and the number of works in the Higher Level is excessive. My biggest criticism is the limited amount of creative responses possible. And many people point out that the IB seems elitist, focusing only on university-bound students and the skills they will need. (Working in a country where only university-bound students attend ‘high school,’ this is not so much a concern for me.)

Those concerns aside, I really like teaching the Diploma courses. Aside from anything else, the rigor of the course challenges me as a learner and a teacher, and I enjoy that.

Anything to add? Any disagreements?

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bookpost: Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Published on 19 March 2011

Roald Dahl is best known for children’s books, but he wrote for adults as well. I happened to find this and another collection (Someone Like You) second-hand in London some years ago.

The stories are mostly of the weird and mysterious type, many of them involving crimes, several of them straying into the horror genre. Most of the stories feature upper middle class folks who are more venal or unhinged than one would expect. They remind me of John Cheever stories, but less subtle, which is sometimes fun and sometimes off-putting. They have those surprise endings that were the hallmark of popular short stories for a century. (Does that sort of writer exist anymore? Is there a professional medium for publishing non-literary, entertaining short stories?)

I enjoyed the characterization; he seems to put  more into the characters than is needed just to get the punchy dénouement. As a result, they are more psychological and personalized. But the psychology of the stories is also a weakness because several of the stories, especially toward the end of the collection, are ham-fistedly Freudian, which gives them a misogynist hue. He is also more detailed about the science of the mad-science fiction than I care for, but I guess it is a hazard of the genre.

My favorite from the collection is ‘The Champion of the World,’ about two hapless poachers trying to pull off the greatest poaching of pheasants ever. It has less of a ‘Takes of the Weird’ vibe to it, celebrating the bravado of the marginalized with the balance of a skeptical narrator. I believe it was the genesis for Dahl’s novel Danny, The Champion of the World.

Overall, I was a little disappointed. I have read some of his stories-for-adults before, and they seemed more clever and less goofy than these, and I look forward to looking at the other volume that has those earlier stories.

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Much Ado About Nothing & The Love Quiz

Published on 18 March 2011

Today I started our unit on Shakespearean comedy with grade 10. When I was a newish teacher, I used to start the Shakespeare units with loads of social and cultural context. I killed it. Basically I was saying that Shakespeare is technical and difficult and you need to know oh-so-much to appreciate it. These days I take a more affective approach.

We read Much Ado About Nothing, and I start by giving the this Love Quiz:

I  have them choose 2-3 responses in which they are especially interested, and they prepare to defend their answer. The class discussion that comes out of this is fascinating; in past years, the conversation continues between students for days afterward outside of class and on Facebook. The range of ideas about love and marriage is amazing, from the very idealistic to the very cynical.

My goal is to engage them emotionally so they have a personal interest in the content of the play, and it works. I follow it up with a very quick presentation (about 20 minutes) to give a little context and technical vocabulary. We watch the Branagh version, read it and do quick performance activities an act at a time.

One of my goals is to help them see that they can understand the language in short doses, so this year I’ve stuck A4 pages with these questions on the wall, and when we come across passages that relate we’ll print them off and put them up.

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school trips

Published on 13 March 2011

I spent the last week on a school trip in London with 20 grade 9 and 10 students and two other teachers. It’s my third time doing the trip and the second time with the same team of teachers.

The entire middle years programme has a trip week. Grades 6-8 have fixed trips every year, and 9-10 have language trips, alternating between trips to England and France/Spain every other year. It’s a good system. This year, about 2/3 of the students went on the trips, and the ones who didn’t had a week of School Without Walls, doing things in Helsinki.

I really enjoy these trips, and not just for the chance to return to one of the great cities in the world, a place where my wife and I lived just after getting married and where two of our sons were born. I also love the chance for students to see and experience a new culture, not just the attractions I take them to. I love allowing students to see the school stuff we do in a totally authentic environment. I love the chance for students to try out being on their own . I love the camaraderie that comes out between students and staff.

Here’s a Google Map I made for the trip. In planning, I wanted us to be busy but have lots of free time, where students could choose what to do within a limited space. The  museums work very well for that, as well as specific spaces like Covent Garden. I also made sure that we were out in the evenings rather than sitting around the hostel getting all wired up. We also walked a lot.

I saw lots of student groups taking notes and working on handouts, but we did none of that. Instead, we set them loose and had quick debriefs afterward. This was especially important after the more emotionally intense activities, like the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum and the plays (War Horse and Billy Elliot).

Some quick thoughts about what I picked up as a teacher on this trip:

  • Spending five days in the presence of teaching colleagues told me how little time we spend together during the year. Both of my fellow travellers are excellent teachers, and we had excellent conversations about teaching, learning and our world views generally.
  • Kids were genuinely interested to see the connections made between their curriculum and the stuff we saw. For instance, in the Tate Modern, we saw some examples of surreal art, which personally does nothing for me. However, the kids got very excited because they studied that in grade 9 art. Same with the Varieties of English exhibit at the British Library: we did a unit on the history and development of the language earlier this year and the grade 10s showed real enthusiasm for what they saw, feeling like experts.
  • At the hostel, there were many student groups, and it was interesting to watch teachers try to manage their kids in the dining hall. Basically, sitting at a table away from students and shouting at them is less effective, being organized and interacting with the kids works better. Huh.
  • We had no  discipline issues. There are several reasons for this, starting with clearly defined rules with specific consequences of not following those rules and staff members with a reputation for following through. But more significantly, I take the tack of being honest with them about the sacrifice I make to organize the trip and be away from my family for a week. I also explain to them the risks I am taking by taking them to London and giving them a high degree of freedom, and the stress involved in certain activities, mostly moving through the Underground. I find that they respond well to this. I have taught almost all of these students, and so we have a personal relationship.
  • There is something exciting about seeing how kids are on their own. Some stuck with the herd; others tried new things. I had a pair of boys who insisted on walking around the block and exploring at every stop. It was great to hear their observations. Another set of boys decided not to go shopping at all, instead wandering around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park for two hours. Again, they had a minor adventure and the more mercantile students were somewhat jealous.

It was a great trip (partially because of the great weather) and I look forward to doing it again in 2013.

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