I committed to 28 days of writing this morning. Tomorrow, the students of Team Run DMC (long story, which may be told here within the next 28 days) will be portraying figures from US history (in costume, naturally) including George Washington and Abigail Adams, Dolores Huerta, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Carl Sagan. These luminaries are gathering for what I named (not really thinking through the implications, beyond the idea that it consisted of "great" figures from history) the All-time Greatest Panel, to discuss their responses to Barack Obama's 2015 State of the Union.
So, it was possibly not the best day to start my 28 days. I stayed at school to arrange tables and chairs for the panel, print out "reserved" signs for the rows where 5th graders will be sitting who are attending the (11th grade) panel discussion, set out the name cards for each character, flip a coin to decide which of the two students representing each character will read the opening statement (as the coin skittered around my silent and unobserved office, using up valuable milliseconds, I started to wonder whether I was taking my commitment to randomness a little too far). I created note-taking sheets with prompts for a few students to fill out who will sit at a row of tables in the back. I set a ruler with a right-angle next to the note-taking sheet that asked for a diagram connecting speakers in the order they spoke, because I realized the diagram shape I'd made was too small (I took this technique from a socratic seminar method I once heard about - the name has "tables" in it). Then I laid out a couple sheets of blank paper at each character's spot, just behind their name card, then drove to Costco to buy bottles of water and pens, because it occurred to me that if this were a conference, everyone would have paper for taking notes, a ball point pen, and a bottle of water.
All of which means that at this point, it's a little late and I'm pretty tired. However, it just so happens that I wrote up the strange saga of how this project reached this pretty pass over the weekend, and this gives me an excuse to shape it up and post it - which was what I'd intended to do when I started drafting it on Saturday. Here it goes:
How it began: The "Rock the Document" Project
In November, I found an ad in the Atlantic magazine for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board’s essay competition, for which students were supposed to write essays about various historical documents, selected by AP US History teachers as the documents they were most excited about discussing with their students. I read that, and had a dangerous thought: "there's a really good project here. I'm not sure what it is yet, but that's bound to come eventually."
The plan I developed (using the term "plan" extremely loosely) was for students to host discussions about various documents at tables in what we would set up as an 18th century coffee house. I never made a prototype of this (either of the essay, or of whatever I’d require to host a discussion), so the project never made sense to me, or seemed especially interesting. So the weekend before we returned from Winter break, I realized the project had never coalesced into an idea I was excited about - and I hadn't written a prototype essay so I had no idea what it would be like to actually write an essay for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board's essay competition. In addition, though I'd read the list of documents from which students could choose, I hadn't picked over them one-by-one and determined what I thought of them.
On Sunday (Monday was a staff day, so I figured I still had plenty of time), I called my friend Dan, formerly a High Tech High teacher, still an authority on all things educational. You can see my notes from our conversation below.
