My project has not been exactly stellar in terms of the quality of output of my students. We've had to circle back. (Many were cutting and pasting information from wikkipedia for example.) Just getting them to turn in SOMETHING has been a challenge. The project coordinator sat down with the liaison with 826Michigan and came up with short essay for the students to write something about the present. A day in the life, or what a day at Roberto Clemente is like or the prompt: if I wish someone had told me this.... about high school.
The students had to write a half page by hand in order to receive a laptop and go to the library yesterday. A few of them hung back in the classroom particularly stumped about what to write. I sat with them trying to get them to think about anything. Not to censure themselves but just get their pen moving and allow the creative process to start. It was a mixed bag. By the end of the hour, the goal was get them to open a Google document and share it with the teacher so that they could go back and add to it.
These kids, not all but many, are clearly done with this project. Makes me worry about the book.
Where is their apathy coming from? Many don’t have relationship to books in general, which is one reason they're not connecting to the project. Others show so little motivation that people end up doing things for them. Many are kids from broken homes, often in poverty. Some of their parents are in jail or substance abuse problems. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that they are used to just being neglected. They assumed we would go away and take our book project with us.
We started out trying to get them to write imaginary versions of history. But many didn't know the original version. Then we had them write about an imaginary future.
In these essays they have very unrealistic views of what their future will be like.
I read an article recently by Malcolm Gladwell, I think, that said American kids for all their short-comings don’t lack self-esteem. In face, they tend to over-estimate their performances on tests when compared to their results. Whereas in South Korea and Japan, where secondary students test much higher than American kids, students underestimate their performance. American kids have a huge disconnect between their self-perception and objective measurements. This study suggests we might be giving them too much positive conditioning and not enough tough love. A little too simplistic but clearly expectations are low.
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