I plan to record myself explaining how to use Explain Everything, an iPad application. I have already explained this program to my English 9 students, actually, and unfortunately did not have the foresight to record myself, but what I record will be very similar to the four conversations I have already had on that subject. Specifically, I intend to record the second five minutes of that lesson, after I have explained the Explain Everything tools. During that second segment of the lesson, I began to demonstrate how to create an Explain Everything movie in order to teach how to diagram a sentence; I will recreate that discussion in my video.
As for the whiz-bang elements of my video, such as opening credits, voice-over, and music, I will make those choices as I am editing. I will be making my video in iMovie, a program I'm familiar with, so I don't feel a lot of trepidation.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Legally Yours
What legal concerns do I have as a teacher? Hmmmm.
I suppose the truest answer to that question is the following: I have no concerns about the legality of what I say and do...and thus I have many, even endless legal concerns.
I have the great pleasure of teaching at an independent school -- a private school without religious affiliation. Although in Ohio, we have access to some public funding (textbooks and school buses, for instance) and our students take the Ohio Graduation Test, both unusual compared to independent schools in other states, our school does not answer to the state or school district standards that shape the experiences of so many teachers and students, nor does it answer to the expectations of a faith community. I mention this because in general, Seven Hills is neither a litigious nor a punctilious place. Aside from specific expectations regarding quarterly and yearly reports, communication between teachers and parents is rarely narrowly defined or formal. The chain of command is not something many of us think about with regularity. The interactions between students and teachers are warm, trusting, and often affectionate: while I take pains to maintain the understanding that I am a teacher, an adult, a colleague of my fellow teachers, and a representative of the school, the time I spend with my classroom students, my advisees, and the editors of the literary magazine I oversee are fun, friendly, and defined by caring. I pat kids on the shoulder almost every day. I never think twice before offering a crying student a hug. And I'm not the only one: although each of my colleagues manages his or her own interactions with students differently, my approach and behavior are not unusual.
Furthermore, as an upper school teacher, I teach relatively advanced students, both in age and in thinking. Our school community is, especially in the relatively conservative context of greater Cincinnati, fairly open and fairly liberal in its thinking. I have considerable control over my curriculum, as do my colleagues, especially in disciplines like English (mine) and history, in which we are no more tied to a textbook than we wish to be. In our English department, we teach or have taught texts that some schools cannot or choose not to, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ellen Foster, Beloved, and Fight Club. I have used articles or excerpts from The Onion and The Devil's Dictionary; I have shown Dave Chappelle's Inside the Actor's Studio interview; next year a colleague and I will, in all likelihood, teach a multi-week unit on YouTube as a form of text in our culture. Any one of these choices might be problematic at a different sort of school, but at Seven Hills (especially if we discuss potentially controversial choices with our department head or head of curriculum before we head into the classroom), such selections are acceptable and even welcomed.
Amid such an atmosphere, we as teachers, or at least I as a teacher, give little consideration to legal issues. Frankly, I have at best a murky sense of when I would be thinking about legal issues if I taught in another sort of school. Certainly, there are those within the school community who do know more and worry more: our division heads, our head of operations, the counselors. If I had such a role, or if I worked in athletics, managed community service trips, or oversaw overseas study, I would need to have more knowledge, and of course I would give liability of all sorts more of my attention. But as it is, I know relatively little and worry even less...
...which is I have endless concerns, or should. My mother, who served on the public school board in my hometown for two decades, heard me chuckle once about teaching my favorite word, callipygian, to my eleventh grade English students. When I told her what it meant (having shapely buttocks), she was something just short of aghast: "Meredith, you would never, never be able to get away with that in a public school. Seriously, you should watch yourself." While I laughed off her admonition -- the environment I teach in is simply so different from the one she knew well -- I think regularly about her advice. Probably, I should find a spot on the "worry spectrum" somewhere between my mother's and my own as a young teacher. In fact, it's fair to say that in fourteen years, I have moved closer to that middle. All the same, I'm sure that every month (I hope not every week or day!), I do something that could, in the worst of circumstances, offer space for some sort of legal challenge or at least the threat of one.
Now that I've thought about it at such length, I'm actually quite concerned. I'm not being cute -- I really am concerned.
I suppose the truest answer to that question is the following: I have no concerns about the legality of what I say and do...and thus I have many, even endless legal concerns.
I have the great pleasure of teaching at an independent school -- a private school without religious affiliation. Although in Ohio, we have access to some public funding (textbooks and school buses, for instance) and our students take the Ohio Graduation Test, both unusual compared to independent schools in other states, our school does not answer to the state or school district standards that shape the experiences of so many teachers and students, nor does it answer to the expectations of a faith community. I mention this because in general, Seven Hills is neither a litigious nor a punctilious place. Aside from specific expectations regarding quarterly and yearly reports, communication between teachers and parents is rarely narrowly defined or formal. The chain of command is not something many of us think about with regularity. The interactions between students and teachers are warm, trusting, and often affectionate: while I take pains to maintain the understanding that I am a teacher, an adult, a colleague of my fellow teachers, and a representative of the school, the time I spend with my classroom students, my advisees, and the editors of the literary magazine I oversee are fun, friendly, and defined by caring. I pat kids on the shoulder almost every day. I never think twice before offering a crying student a hug. And I'm not the only one: although each of my colleagues manages his or her own interactions with students differently, my approach and behavior are not unusual.
Furthermore, as an upper school teacher, I teach relatively advanced students, both in age and in thinking. Our school community is, especially in the relatively conservative context of greater Cincinnati, fairly open and fairly liberal in its thinking. I have considerable control over my curriculum, as do my colleagues, especially in disciplines like English (mine) and history, in which we are no more tied to a textbook than we wish to be. In our English department, we teach or have taught texts that some schools cannot or choose not to, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ellen Foster, Beloved, and Fight Club. I have used articles or excerpts from The Onion and The Devil's Dictionary; I have shown Dave Chappelle's Inside the Actor's Studio interview; next year a colleague and I will, in all likelihood, teach a multi-week unit on YouTube as a form of text in our culture. Any one of these choices might be problematic at a different sort of school, but at Seven Hills (especially if we discuss potentially controversial choices with our department head or head of curriculum before we head into the classroom), such selections are acceptable and even welcomed.
Amid such an atmosphere, we as teachers, or at least I as a teacher, give little consideration to legal issues. Frankly, I have at best a murky sense of when I would be thinking about legal issues if I taught in another sort of school. Certainly, there are those within the school community who do know more and worry more: our division heads, our head of operations, the counselors. If I had such a role, or if I worked in athletics, managed community service trips, or oversaw overseas study, I would need to have more knowledge, and of course I would give liability of all sorts more of my attention. But as it is, I know relatively little and worry even less...
...which is I have endless concerns, or should. My mother, who served on the public school board in my hometown for two decades, heard me chuckle once about teaching my favorite word, callipygian, to my eleventh grade English students. When I told her what it meant (having shapely buttocks), she was something just short of aghast: "Meredith, you would never, never be able to get away with that in a public school. Seriously, you should watch yourself." While I laughed off her admonition -- the environment I teach in is simply so different from the one she knew well -- I think regularly about her advice. Probably, I should find a spot on the "worry spectrum" somewhere between my mother's and my own as a young teacher. In fact, it's fair to say that in fourteen years, I have moved closer to that middle. All the same, I'm sure that every month (I hope not every week or day!), I do something that could, in the worst of circumstances, offer space for some sort of legal challenge or at least the threat of one.
Now that I've thought about it at such length, I'm actually quite concerned. I'm not being cute -- I really am concerned.
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