Day 5 - February 18, 2015

Graduating year, final performance of HS.  This was the wonderful cast.

Today was my presentation day! So much pressure!

But first, the wave.  I like the idea of this activity but once again the content was a bit too intense for me.  This time it was dealing with homelessness.  The wave is when everyone walks in a line...a wave if you will....someone will drop out into a tableaux only to be picked back up by the group when it swings around again.  I thought about dropping out but I didnt have anything to say about homelessness that I can portray with just my body.

Next up, our presentation.  I was feeling fine about it, I was prepared, I had faith in my group and I enjoy talking in front of people so there was little to no nervousness.  Our group made a concentrated effort to stay away from the heavy topics because Kim and I are not huge fans of those types of topics, the rest of the group was okay with it because we chose a very fun book, the Hiccupotomas.  This was a story about a hippo with hiccups! It's great fun!  My part of the assignment was to work on the picture walk strategy.  A picture walk is a form of predicting the text where you will show a picture and have the students predict in tableaux what will happen next.

Explaining the picture walk to our audience! (I have this shirt on a LOT in photos)

We used a few scenes from the book and the class seemed to really enjoy it.  The rest of my group presented without a hitch!  We also used the voice over narration, mime and guided visualization as the rest of our strategies. (our prezi with our expectations and the lesson can be found here: https://prezi.com/azfz00pa6uzs/the-hiccupotamus/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy)

Kim presenting Guided Visualization and me looking all together far too intense.

The theory talked about in class was the Critical Position Theory which states that a persons upbringing and personal experience contribute to our identities.  Some of these things can change (attitude, clothes, mood.etc) while others are fixed.  It's very important for teachers to be able to make the distinction so you're not trying to change something that can't really be changed.

The last thing we looked at in class was the critical analysis process from the curriculum.  I personally think this is one of the most important things looked at all year so far simply because I believe that there is not enough critical thinkers in the world.

The proliferation of information on the internet means I can tell someone that there is such a thing as "Drop Bears" a supposedly bloodthirsty marsupial with a weakness for Vegemite, back it up with a webpage and a wiki entry, and BOOM...its a fact.  If you seriously Google drop bear the first 3 entries all perpetuate the hoax (seriously: http://australianmuseum.net.au/drop-bear, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_bear, and http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Drop_bear).  I think this is hilarious, but also sad.  People should see this sort of stuff and instantly think "nope" but because its online its fact?  I think we as teachers should focus more on critical thinking and analysis because hopefully that will help defeat the rampant misinformation that exists online.

This was a great second last week of class and I was very excited to see what comes next!