For Thursday, September 17, 1998 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 734 words

Feeling groovy

I'm off to a great start this school year. I like all my students, my classes, my room, the material we're studying, the campus, the whole honeycomb.

Teachers are remaining playful. Now a batch of them have volunteered to go whitewater rafting with me. We'll mosey down the South Fork American. Perhaps I can negotiate a couple extra cases of white paper from my department chairs as we drift into sight of Satan's Cesspool.

My classes are exciting. In my three freshmen literature classes we are studying Greek and Roman Mythology. We are working on an individual class performance. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but everyone has a solo presentation in the big production.

For a week we will become gods and goddesses. Students will pick individual characters, learn about them, and tell their stories first person. They will also have to blend their presentation in with the presentations of others to create some sort of cohesive, overall, chronological or narrative order.

Shhh. Don't tell the kids, but I've never done mythology this way before. I'm making this whole lesson plan up from scratch. This year's group will be the pioneers. I have no idea what obstacles and laughs we will face.

I am following the advice of last years' students. They wrote me letters. I shared them here one day. Some asked for more organized activities, instead of discussing and debating everything to death. I hear them. We're giving it a go.

Another reason we're studying mythology through student-centered performances it to juxtapose divergent teaching methods. I have a chart of 15 evaluated teaching methods. The weakest yet most ubiquitous is lecture -- in one ear and out the other. The most effective method appears to be small-group interaction and production.

Our last unit was on study skills. I lectured that unit, and we learned how to take notes, a critical survival skill for learning from lectures. The mythology unit will be done in small groups. We'll see for ourselves what works best.

My journalism class is the biggest and the most talented group of people I have ever seen assembled in my 14 years of teaching newspaper writing. The energy level is almost visible. There is a jagged blue aura around us when we gather in one room. This summer my editors came home from journalism camp with top writing honors.

This year we are making a gallant plunge. If you know the PAW paper, then you know it has been on 8.5 x 11-inch white paper run on the school copier for 12 years. We've never had the money that other schools had to publish the paper on actual newsprint. Well, this year, we are going for it. We've gone ahead with the format change and made contact with several publishers. Now all we need to do is find the funding. It will cost us around $500 an issue, and we have eight issues.

If we come knocking at your store, I hope you will at least let us make our pitch.

My computer repair class has gone through a significant transformation this year. We are now a Regional Occupational Program (ROP). That means that I get to fill out two attendance sheets instead of one. It also means that the school no longer has to pay my salary for that hour. It's picked up by the county. It also means that my students will receive ROP certificates upon completion, which may help them find employment.

For the last two years, the program goals have been for students to become proficient in hardware maintenance, then provide field support for all the sick computers in the district. This year, we have added two more goals. We will now learn job seeking and keeping skills, and focus our studies toward passing the computer industry's newly accepted technician-approval standard, called A+ Certification. A+ Certified technicians find it easier to get jobs.

Shucks, I didn't leave room to brag about my new, cool school web site. I've posted all my lesson plans and course descriptions. I hope other teachers see it, grow jealous, and ask me to show them how to create their own cool school web sites. I hope parents see it and ask their children's teachers to ask me to show them how to create their own cool school web site.

Please check it out. Give me pointers. It's at http://home.inreach.com/gibbo/bhs/