9.01.2004

Who Do They Think We Are?

I just got done with a faculty meeting. One of the things that was brought up was this new thing we are doing this year. Instead of having homerooms divided grouped by grade level, we are having and advisory group which is made up of a mixture of ninth through eleventh graders.(The twelfth graders have their own group because they have so many "senior" things to do.) We meet once a week and are supposed to use this time to do "group building" activities. That's all good. The students all paired up and learned something about their partner and then shared this with the class. I suppose that's good. It gives the students a sense of belonging, and it insures that they know someone else in the school. Also, as these groups are small, it gives the teacher a chance to more personally relate to a group of students, giving each student at least one adult in the building who they can feel comfortable talking to.

One of the activities we did the other day has me wondering where this is going however. We had to brainstorm a name for our group. Later we are going to be making a banner to put up in our room for our group. Maybe it's just me, but this seems a little too "middle school" for me. I taught middle school, and there is a reason why I don't anymore. One of the reasons was all of the time spent on non-academic activities. I can see spending some time doing non-academic things but with the focus on student achievement that has been placed on us by the No Child Left Behind act, do we really have the time to spend on "feel good" activities? I know that students need to feel like they belong, but we will be spending over 18 hours on this over the course of the school year. That is a lot of lost class time. And, I hate to say this for fear of how it will make me sound, but we did fine when I was in high school without something like this and I am not a fairly well-adjusted individual, but maybe that's just me. Perhaps everyone else is just messed up.

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