20% Update - Week 3

Sometimes, the carrot isn't sweet enough (a carrot is never sweet, according to one of my students), tasty enough, or enticing enough to merit the motivation needed to achieve the success equivalent to the expectations we set out.  No matter the reward, there are times where it just doesn't matter.  As human beings, we are designed to fail.  After all, how else are we supposed to learn?  For the 20% project this week, today was that day, but not for everyone.

As a way to have some sort of "ticket in" to their 20% time and justify the use of school time for personal projects to administrators if they ever ask, we have a weekly quiz that is designed to check for understanding of the week's concepts.  This week, we were finishing up with factoring special cases of polynomials and I'll get right to it- the class did terrible.  I take full responsibility for it, but there are so many "special cases" that we can't get to all of them.  Even so, we had work to do.  Yet, at the same time, students were excited to work on their projects.

While most of the class spent some time working on correcting their errors from the quiz, a few students had a chance to do something pretty special.  Using my network of friends, I was able to pair up a couple of groups with mentors that could share what they know.

During 1st period, a friend of mine who runs the website for Agua Caliente was able to come in and show a group some tricks about HTML coding and website design.  They were a bit overwhelmed with the content, but seeing what it takes to be a website developer and talking with him about some of his experiences were more useful than anything.  

It's funny to see how people react when they come in from the "business world" and interact with adolescents.  We take for granted the ease of which we are able to create relationships with our students and how well we can relate to them.  Partly because we've been stuck in that age group long enough to "get them", but I believe it's in a teacher's blood to have the pulse of the students.

The next group truly had a treat.  A friend of mine is an actress, singer, and dancer.  The group was interested in what it takes to be in the entertainment industry and I had the perfect person that they could interact with.  Paloma Michelle is a hard-at-work musician/actress who is about to make it big on the big stage.  

We were lucky to have her talk to the students because of issues with FaceTime.  Once we moved over to Skype (turned out to be a district filtering issue), Paloma was able to have a great chat with the students about her experiences in the entertainment business and what she has gone through to get there.  

Hopefully this fires up the students as they continue to work on their 20% project.  Having that connection with these professionals is something that will provide a continued mentor relationship as they work through the rest of their project and beyond. Both of my friends said that they would be more than happy to talk with the students again, telling me that it wasn't just the students' perspective that things went well. 

Note to self: do this more often.

Happy Fishing - I'm fired up