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FINAL 2016 BOISE Workbook To Distribute COMMENTARIES by Students BOISE WORKBOOK
FINAL 2016 BOISE Workbook To Distribute COMMENTARIES by Students BOISE WORKBOOK
Fred Banks
Josephine Lopez
tinyURL.com/BoiseWorkbook
ISBN-13: 9
78-1539097709
ISBN-10: 1
539097706
Copyleft 2016
Its okay to copy these pages.
Please do what we did:
show these quotes to students and teachers,
build discussions,
then ask for changes in the school.
Fred Banks
Josephine Lopez
Workbook committee
This book is ready for photocopying. You can also get the free ebook from
our OneDrive account.
TINYURL.com/BoiseWorkbook
Instructions: Print or photocopy pages 9-70 and put these pages on walls
in front of students.
Collect their comments and send the commentaries to
TrintaAnos@live.com
Well include the commentaries in the next edition of this workbook.
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http://www.themethighschool.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=384346&type=
d&pREC_ID=885572
Our five academies are called Liberty, Peace, Unity, Equality, and Justice,
named after the academies at Big Picture School in Providence, R.I.
You can photocopy pages 9 to 52 and put the pages around your
classroom. Who knows what students will respond to?
tinyURL.com/BoiseWorkbook
To the students...
What are your comments about these quotes?
Quotes from Neil Postman
Here is the challenge to the students at Boise Central High School. Can
you put this quote into words that my grandmother will understand?
COMMENTARIES BY STUDENTS GO HERE
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http://www.qotd.org/search/single.html?qid=69114
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Teaching as a Subversive
Activity by Neil Postman
Try listening to
your students for a
day or two. We do
not mean reacting
to what they say. We
mean listening. If you
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
INSTRUCTIONS:
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
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INSTRUCTIONS
(give your name or write anonymous or make up a name. Explain
why you think this is a good procedure or suggest another idea.
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
strategy, deprives students of the excitement of doing their own finding and of the opportunity
for increasing their power as learners.
His basic mode of discourse with students is questioning. While he uses both convergent
and divergent questions, he regards the latter as the more important tool. He emphatically does
not view questions as a means of seducing students into parroting the text or syllabus; rather,
he sees questions as instruments to open engaged minds to unsuspected possibilities.
He does not ask for the reason, but for the reasons. Not
for the cause, but the causes. never the meaning, the meanings. He knows, too, the power
of contingent thinking. He is the most 'It depends' learners in his class.
as opposed to
student-teacher interaction.
Generally, each of his lessons poses a problem for students. Almost all of his questions,
proposed activities and assignments are aimed at having his students clarify a problem, make
observations relevant to the solution of the problem, and make generalizations based on their
observations.
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His goal is to engage students in those activities which produce knowledge: defining,
questioning, observing, classifying, generalizing, verifying, applying. As we have said, all
knowledge is a result of these activities. Whatever we think we 'know' about astronomy,
sociology, chemistry, biology,, etc, was discovered or invented by someone who was more or
less an expert in using inductive methods of inquiry. Thus, our inquiry, or 'inductive', teacher is
largely interested in helping his students to become more proficient as users of these methods.
He measures his success in terms of behavioral changes in students:
How often do they ask questions;
the increase in the relevance of their questions;
the frequency and conviction of their challenges to assertions made by other students or
teachers or textbooks;
the relevance and clarity of the standards on which they base their challenges;
their willingness to suspend judgments when they have insufficient data;
their willingness to modify or change their position when data warrant such change; the
increase in their skill in observing, classifying, generalizing, etc;
the increase in their tolerance for diverse answers;
their ability to apply generalizations, attitudes and information to novel situations.
Comments by students (write on the back of this page)
COMMENTARIES BY STUDENTS GO HERE
INSTRUCTIONS
(give your name or write anonymous or make up a name. Explain
why you think this is a good procedure or suggest another idea.
COMMENTARY
Which of these actions by the Inquiry teacher do you
like? Why?
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
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FATHER: (Silence.)
MOTHER: Your son has been making a birthday gift for you at Jack's house. He wanted it to be
a surprise for you tomorrow morning. A nice start for the day. He has just a bit more work to do
on it to finish it. He wanted to get it done as early as possible tonight so he could bring it home
and wrap it up for tomorrow and then he'd still have time to do his homework.
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To the students...
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that what students say is not the 'content' of instruction. Therefore, it will not be included on
tests. Therefore, they can ignore it.
Have you ever heard of a student indicating an interest in how a textbook writer arrived at
his conclusions? Rarely, we would guess. Most students are unaware that textbooks are
written by human beings. Besides, the classroom structure does not suggest that the processes
of inquiry are of any importance.
Have you ever heard of a student suggesting a more useful definition of something that
the teacher has already defined? Or of a student who asked, 'Whose facts are those?' Or of a
student who asked, 'What is a fact?' Or of a student who asked, 'Why are we doing this work?'
INSTRUCTIONS
(give your name or write anonymous or make up a name. Explain
why you think this is a good procedure or suggest another idea.
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
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WORKBOOK ACTIVITY
To the students...
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This is a section for young men who think its cool to pester a young woman until she agrees
to go on a date with him.
. Im curious. Do young men have a hard time admitting that women are superior?
More women attend college than men.
Butterflies
Don't take women for granted,
They have a hard time
Don't misunderstand them
Dont play with their minds
Treat them so gently,
it will pay you in time
You've got to know
They are the sensitive kind
Many women can sense a change in temperature sooner than most men.
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Men usually have greater upper body strength, build muscle easily, have
thicker skin, bruise less easily and have a lower threshold of awareness of
injuries to their extremities. Men are essentially built for physical
confrontation and the use of force.
The joints of men are well suited for throwing objects. A mans skull is
almost always thicker and stronger than a womens.
A mans "thick headedness" help him look for risky behavior that usually
involve collisions with other males or automobiles.
Men invented the game "chicken", not women.
Men, and a number of other male species of animals charge and crash into
each other in their spare time.
Women on the other hand have four times as many brain cells
(neurons) connecting the right and left side of their brain.
Men use their left brain to solve one problem one step
at a time. Women have more efficient access to both
sides of their brain and therefore greater use of their
right brain.
Women
can
focus on more
than one problem
at one time and
frequently prefer
to solve problems
through multiple
activities at a
time.
Young girls find
the conversations
of young boys
"boring".
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We have framed - as we asked you to do - some questions, which, in our judgment, are
responsive to the actual and immediate as against the fancied and future needs of learners in
the world as it is (not as it was).
In this, we have not surveyed thousands of students, but have consulted with many, mostly in
junior and senior high school. We have tried variations of these questions with children in
primary grades. By and large, the response was enthusiastic - end serious. There seemed to be
At this point it might be worth noting that our list of questions is intended to 'educate' students.
Contrary to conventional school practice, what that means is that we want to elicit from
students the meanings that they have already stored up so that they may subject those
meanings to a testing and verifying, reordering and reclassifying, modifying and
extending process. In this process, the student is not a passive 'recipient'; he
The word 'educate' is closely related to the word 'educe'. ..this meant drawing out of a
person something potential or latent. We can, after all, learn only in relation to what we
already know.
Again, contrary to common misconceptions, this means that if we don't know very much, our
capability for learning is not very great.
This idea - virtually by itself - requires a major revision in most of the metaphors that shape
school policies and procedures.
Reflect on these questions - and others that these can generate.
Please do not merely react to them.
These questions can be posted on a classroom wall and students can put comments below the
questions.
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break up big schools and turn them into smaller ones. Bill and Melinda
Gates have actually taken on the call for smaller schools as their own
personal mission:
In less than four years of grantmaking, the Gates Foundation has
transformed the notion of replacing large, comprehensive high schools
with smaller, more personal models into a national movement. The worlds
wealthiest philanthropy has earmarked nearly $700 million to states, school
systems, and a range of nonprofit organizations to create 1,400 mostly
urban high schools of 400 or fewer students eachsome of them in new
locations, some of them in large, existing high school buildings that have
been subdivided.
But even in light of this, progress is slow and difficult. Debbie Meier told me
about a town (one, Im sure, that is not unique in its thinking) that wanted
smaller schools, but was afraid that too much competition would arise in
the community if there were more than one school serving the same grade
levels. The town compromised by decreasing the number of grade levels
per building. The thing is, it now has a school with 800 7th and 8th graders,
and a K2 school with nearly 1,000 kids. To avoid competition, the town set
up smaller schools that are nowhere near small. Of course, inside these
schools, teachers are still giving grades and tests and handing out honors
that are mired in competition. Rather than thinking of small schools as
creating unnecessary competition, why not think of them as creating very
necessary choice for parents and kids about where they go to learn?
When we started Shoreham-Wading River, we had 300 kids, and we added
more every year. When enrollment reached 600, I broke the school up into
three small schools: one for 6th grade, one for 7th, and one for 8th. It
seemed like a natural division; plus, we had approximately 200 students in
each of these grade levels. After a while, though, we realized that
separating the grade levels in this way meant that every year, teachers
were getting kids theyd never met before. So we changed things up,
putting 6th, 7th, and 8th graders together in three small, 200-student
schools, which would allow teachers who worked together to share
the same small group of kids over time. That was in 1972. I didnt do it
because schools-within-schools was a cool idea at the time. I did it
because I wanted my teachers to know their kids as well as possible,
and I knew that size mattered.
Send your comments to TrintaAnos@live.com
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Invite students to
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