Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Week 2

Aidan summed things up pretty well in his entry. I just wanted to add a few of my own observations.

It's a shame that when we met the kids from our second class, they thought someone had made a mistake and didn't understand why they were there. I think that for these kids to be shocked by the fact that we were pulling them out of their normal classes and to even go so far as to view it as punishment (not that our teaching is punishment, I hope it's a step up at least, but that they thought they had done something wrong to deserve special treatment) says a lot about the way that remedial education goes (does it have to? really, I don't know).

The kids in our first class are all really interested in fantasy, which I guess is hard for me to identify with now, but at that age, I remember eating up Brian Jaques' books or the Foundation series.

It was hilarious what the kids chose to write about for their Haiku. Aidan and I were trying to teach the classes about traditional Haiku subjects like the season, loneliness, meditation and contemplation, etc. Some of the things we got, though, were rad skateboarding Haiku about Bam Margera and Tony Hawk or just shredding more generally on skates. We got poems about seasons- which let us know that we were getting through a little bit. But it was also cool, because the Haiku is such a minimalist snapshot form, to see just a glimpse into the heads of our kids. Soccer, pizza- what else is on their minds?

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