Quantcast
Channel: Scrutinies » great adventure
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

T3 Teen Timeline

$
0
0

You can boot the girl out of the classroom and move her across the country, but you can’t take the classroom out of the girl. No matter how disorganized or overcommitted she is, she will scooch her way back over towards the markerboard while you’re not even looking. And then, there she is again, passing out papers and drawing smiley faces on quizzes to make them slightly more palatable to your Wednesday night teen.

Which is all by way of saying, I am teaching CCD now, while on homeschooling leave for the foreseeable future from the regular classroom.

Ninth grade, Scripture class, part of Confirmation prep, half-year course.

I mean, easy peazy, right? C’mon. I have a little something I like to call a Master of Arts in Teaching degree. I have years of experience working with a variety of age groups across socioeconomic and cultural lines in diverse learning situations. I can name the original seven multiple intelligences, and I know how to make copies that are both double-sided and collated.

And this is a sweet deal – a class of no more than 16 students, plus an assistant, plus I can email them my lesson materials and they will run copies in the RE office. They will even LAMINATE them. We all remember my ardent devotion to lamination. Plus it is once a week, plus it is only an hour and a half, plus I have actually taught a Scripture class before.

Plus whatever, because last Fall’s first go-round with this class was a moderately mitigated disaster.

I thought I was bringing – well, not my A-game, but at least my B-plus. We are using the T3 Teen Timeline materials from Ascension Press, which I used in the classroom and initially blogged about here. I still feel that they are the best materials that I’ve seen for this age group, and I still love the color-coding of the 12 periods of Salvation History. We have the DVD series, and I had thought I could use the DVD series of talks as a springboard for class discussion, pausing Mark Hart‘s talk every few minutes to expand upon points he had made and answer questions.

I mean, that’s a decent plan, right? There are quizzes to complement the DVD series, which can even be downloaded by leaders. I thought we’d go with a basic watch/discuss/reflect/quiz framework.

I still think that’s a good way to go with these materials, if you have a group of teens who are there somewhat voluntarily, who are interested in the Bible, and who have a modicum of prior knowledge.

That does not necessarily describe Wednesday night Confirmation prep.

So I’ve been making up my own study guides, games, etc., this second time through the class. I myself am not an auditory learner (what’d I tell you – experienced teacher, right here), so I myself find it hard to pay attention when someone is talking for more than about 15 minutes. Some of this is a character flaw, resulting from my addiction to instantaneous/transient pseudo-knowledge. But I figure that makes me relate pretty well to the tired-out teenager who has already sat through seven classes in school and knows there isn’t really a grade in Confirmation prep class. I mean, there is, but it’s not exactly part of your permanent record.

I assume, therefore, that if I myself have a hard time paying attention to a speaker for more than 15 minutes on a Wednesday night, the average student in the class has an attention span of about 30 seconds. Bring that to Deuteronomy, and you see where problems could set in.

I try to present them with the same information at least two different ways in each class – so, they might have a study guide to complete on their own based on selected Bible verses, and then they’ll talk to their classmates about it, and then I’ll talk to/at them about it, and then there’s a quiz, or a game. Most of our quizzes are open-note. I frequently use quizzes as a way to get them to focus on the information in a very targeted way for a short burst of time. It is also possible that I let them use their notes in order to get them on my side, because I’m “nice.” In reality, you can ask harder questions if you let them use their notes, and the act of processing the information from their notes to answer the question is reinforcing what we’ve talked about.

This second time through with the Scripture class (I got a new group of students in January and sent my old students off to Sacraments class) has gone more smoothly as I’ve made it more “schooly.” The DVD discussion format was too passive to engage students who are watching the clock until it’s time to start texting again. The DVD’s are a great resource for leaders to prepare themselves for class, and might be good as an occasional supplement, but I don’t feel they are suited to weekly use with my particular group of kids.

The study kit that accompanies the DVD’s has some space for taking notes on each talk, but my students need more structure to figure out what’s important. I’d have to pause the talk and say, “if I were you, I would write down XYZ,” giving a meaningful teacher look so that everyone would get my drift. The average kid in the class would not be jotting down information as he’s listening. If I were in the regular classroom and seeing these kids every day, we’d work on note taking skills and I’d be more rigorous in my expectations of what they would write down as I was talking. But this isn’t the venue for that.

And, most important, I want them to learn to read the Bible itself. I like using the T3 materials rather than a conventional textbook, because it’s more conducive to cracking-open-your-Bible than if the students were to merely read quotations from Scripture in the context of a textbook’s summation. I really hope they will leave this class not only moderately familiar with the grand story of Salvation History, but comfortable opening up the Bible to read it on their own. We were losing too much class time to discussion of DVD discussion, which could have been spent reading through some of the stories themselves.

I am rather inept at file sharing via this blog, but would love to post some materials up in here if someone told me how. I know I can make a Google doc, but that seems to lose the Word formatting? I say this based on vague memories of my last attempt in 2007.

The post T3 Teen Timeline appeared first on Scrutinies.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Trending Articles