Brown’s Botanical Blog …

As I was tripping lightly along my plans at the beginning of this year, thinking I was the coolest thing since sliced bread because my kids were going to be able to turn in their homework via e-mail, I was stopped short by the strangest thing I’ve heard a kid say in a long time … “what’s an e-mail?” Before you ask, no this child is not a recent immigrant, an exchange student, or a visitor from Mars (well, I’m pretty sure about the last one).  This young man is just a regular, standard issue Weymouth junior complete with baggy pants and backward turned baseball cap. 

As I started to smell the smoke from my ears and the blue-screen of death before my eyes as my brain ground to a screaching hault, I looked at him and sputtered “What? No gmail, no hotmail, not even AOL?” As his responses were, “No, Nope and AO What?”, I thought that surely this child must live under a rock.  But even rocks have cable modems these days .. don’t they?

As technology has stomped its way into our lives like a herd of elephants, it seems more and more surprising when one of the “digital natives” admits to being digitally impaired.  Like finding a two headed turtle, we look at them as a curiosity but not the norm.  However, as much as we like to believe we are teaching technological wunderkinds, there are a lot more kids out there who have fallen off, or even under the bus. 

How do we address this? What do you do when you start a major project only to find that the most brilliant light in your class is stumbling in the dark when it comes to using PowerPoint?

And for the record … the young man in question now has 3 e-mail address, none of which he can check b/c he can’t remember his passwords or security questions.

At this point, most of us have at least gotten used to the temperature of water in this new domain - even if we haven’t decided to dive in head first.  Some things have elicited “hmm, that’s cool”; while others garner “OMG! You can do that??”  But the question still remains … How will this change my practice, my classroom or, better yet, my school?

In my own Reiki practice, the amount of information available now is endless. From free podcasts of meditations with people that I would never be able to afford to go see in real life to being able to work with clients and students via Skype, Web 2.0 has openned new horizons.  It is now an option for me to offer a distance session “in person”, something unheard of just a few years ago. 

In the future, it may be possible to run my Botany class in a “Where’s Waldo?” type of format where I or my students could be out in the field but still be connected. In addition, students who are unable to be in the classroom for whatever reason could be able to access podcasts or broadcasts of the classes they miss instead of having to play catch-up.  It may not eliminate the need for hometutors (I hope) but it would definitely make the job a lot easier.

“What do you mean there’s academic kids in this class? Isn’t it CP?” Thus begins my first year teaching very mixed classes of students in Botany.  One of my colleagues compared the composition of my classes to everyone on a public bus being told “get off the bus. You’re taking botany.”

To be honest, I was apprehensive at the thought of teaching a mixed ability class.  During my high school career, I spent the lion’s share of my time in Advanced level classes.  The work we did there and the style of the classes probably wasn’t condusive to lifting up lower level kids.  However, the few non-Advanced classes I took were a totally different experience. 

Now that I am teaching classes with kids who have wildly different skill levels and abilities, I have become a fan, if not a proponent of mixed classes.  In Botany, as in many of the CTE classes, there is a great degree of variation in what  the students are expected to do from day to day. Some days students are taking notes in a lecture setting; other days find them up to their elbows in soil.  Each child has at least some chance during the week to participate in an activity that plays to his or her strengths. 

While I still think that there are certain situations where separating the students by skill levels, esp when a student needs a significant amount of assistance, I have come to believe that the kids benefit from mixed classes.  One of the most fantastic things this past year has been watching the kids realize that each of them can do something, that the academic kids might not be able to write a great essay but they can save a basil plant from dying. 

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