Category Archives: Manual Arts

Book Room Discovery #3 – A Captioned Photo Essay

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Book discovered in bookroom in envelope addressed to “Manual Arts High School Book Room.” Obviously, it needed to be opened. This is what was found. Letter can be seen tucked in the front of the book.

Perhaps the greatest letter that will be mailed to Manual Arts anytime soon.

Look at that photo of Ol’ Pop!

The exposition is of a get-down-to-business, fundamentals of the game, variety. It’s a no-nonsense talking to of the ethics and strategy of multiple sports.

Little known fact: Pop Warner was quite the poet – perhaps a moving elegy for our current 3-2 Toiler football team.

The book is currently being kept in an undisclosed location. Though our library does not assess late fines (thank goodness for this person!), it also has a tendency to discard an extraordinary amount of books. I’m wary to return this artifact from another epoch in case it is simply tossed into the ether of yellowed pages.

Are there more book room discoveries to share? Only time will tell.

Book Room Discovery #2

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Awesome dice that students can use to create crazy sentences.

At first there were just five or six dice hidden on shelves or collecting dust in the corner. And then, on the same day as Book Room Discovery #1, we found several plastic tupperware tubs filled with these dice. Just tons of them – still in plastic. Most of our intersession students enjoy manipulating the dice, creating sentences, rolling the dice and creating dada poetry, and (occasionally) taking the foam dice and creating a literal word war across the classroom.

Bookroom Discovery #1

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As mentioned earlier, I’ve been helping out with an intersession class being taught in our school’s bookroom – a cavernous wonder of boxes, dust, and occasional cockroaches.

Mr. Carlson and I have found a few noteworthy discoveries during our time in the room. I will be highlighting two or three of them here.

The first discovery of note:

Yes, that’s 100 copies of The Making of the Rugrats Movie. It’s out of print, so, unless you’re at Manual Arts, you’re going to have to score your copy second hand. In any case, with a cover price of $25 each, I wonder what the story is behind these books (that are now 11 years old and never even taken out of the boxes). Often book publishers throw in extra reading books when our school makes a large textbook order, so these could have been such a situation. However, while I think we can find value in most books being available in our classes, could we have gotten a better use out of $2,500 in book value?

Outdated, severely below the age range of our high school students, and forgotten in the back of the bookroom, here’s yet another example of lack of communication and allocation of resources.

“It only jelps me which is very important. !!!”: On Blogging

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If you have a spare moment, please check out the blog a group of intersession students is currently contributing to. All posts (aside from the sporadic teacher post from Mr. Carlson or myself) are written and (possibly) edited by the students. Yes, there will be occasional typos, grammatical, and spelling errors  – isn’t that part of the blogging experience?

In any case, the goal here is for these students to practice documenting and reflecting on the world from their own perspectives. Taking ownership over the news, literally creating the importance for the outsider to the Manual Arts world is a heavy burden. And the students are taking it in stride.

Teaching an intersession elective course at Manual requires overcoming significant challenges, three of which I want to address here:

Significant Intersession Elective Course Challenge (SIECC) 1: Getting the Class Funded

Although students are regularly offered classes when they go “off-track” on our year round schedule, the classes are primarily to make up failed classes. This year, in particular due to budget restrictions, LAUSD did not fund any intersession classes other than the bare minimum of graduate requirement make up classes. Though an intersession class isn’t expensive (a teacher is compensated for 60 hours of work per intersession course) – getting Manual Arts to offer this “Broadcast Journalism” course required the approval of our School Site Council. As a result, Mr. Carlson is able to teach the students for two hours a day over six weeks (I’m helping out a few days each week, but kudos go to Carlson for steering the class).

SIECC 2: Getting the Class Filled

Because students at our school aren’t regularly offered extracurricular off-track opportunities (especially B-Track, since summer internships and programs are offered while these students are just beginning their school year), retention and getting committed students is a challenge. The commitment comes with having an engaging class (again something that deserves a tip of the digital hat to Carlson). The students are mainly coming from my 11th and 12th grade English classes. Because most of these students are enrolled in my class and have likely had Mr. Carlson in the past, we have a strong group of students with a good rapport – the class is filled and rolling.

SIECC 3: Getting Space

Because of our large student population, getting funding for a class isn’t the end of our headache. We needed a room we could routinely use to teach the class. In the past, I’ve taught intersession courses off campus at heavily discounted fees, subsidized by our school’s network partners. This year, we found that a room was available because most teachers would rather travel than use it. In a small upstairs nook in our bookroom, the students are properly ventilated (thanks to the two fans Mr. Carlson bought and the one larger room fan I “borrowed” from the math lab), the students are able to get online (thanks to the numerous laptops we bring in as well as the three desktop computers working at glacial paces), and the students are able to use the space in a timely manner (discounting the lengthy walk to the back of the campus due to construction detours for a long overdue senior quad redesign project).

Before becoming our bookroom three years ago, the room was used as an industrial (“Manual”) arts or auto shop classroom (I get mixed reports). Photos below detail the classroom setting.

A view from our room, looking down on the rows of books.

A view from our room, looking down on the rows of books.

Looking up to our classroom from the back of the book room.

Looking up to our classroom from the back of the book room.

Oh, all those unopened boxes? Those are just leftover books from when our administration brought in Talent Development without School Site Council approval. No biggie.

Oh, all those unopened boxes? Those are just leftover books from when our administration brought in Talent Development without School Site Council approval. No biggie.

Of course, I’m not mentioning other, structural challenges such as difficulties with students accessing the campus while off-track or the constant technology headaches (thanks to Daye for amazing WordPress expertise!), but those will trickle through the more regular posts to come.

As our students continue to gain confidence in their reporting skills, you are encouraged to question and comment on their posts. In the coming weeks students will be podcasting reports on lockdown procedures for schools as well as distributing DVD news reports for local South Central events. Stay tuned!

p.s. Does anybody know what this is? It’s bolted into the book room since the book room wasn’t always a book room. But what is it??

From Digital Naiveté Toward Digital Nativity

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I facilitated a PD last week on technology use in the classroom. The hour-ish session was a whirlwind run through of research behind technology use, various forms of technology, critical media literacy, and a plea for further exploration of site-based cell phone and social networking use. Along the way, I presented how I use Flip cameras, why I hate PowerPoint (even as people followed along with my Google presentation!), how to literally plug in an LCD projector, defined wikis and blogs, how to show YouTube videos even though the site is blocked, and explained that – sadly – I cannot fix the school’s myriad nonfunctional printers.

Though it was entirely too fast, my goals were to highlight the expertise already present in my attendees’ classrooms and to present as many different ideas that they could use as possible. Several tips seemed to resonate most strongly with the group; the use of PowerPoint as a rudimentary film making tool, for instance, was thrilling for some teachers (and I’m thankful to Jeff Share for being able to adapt this example from him). My hope was that the group would identify areas they would like to more intensely focus on in the future. Feedback was quite positive afterward, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to find a site-based collaborator to further highlight the technology wizardry springing up in our classrooms.

Space: The Unacknowledged Frontier

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The new school year has begun. I teach three 90-minute classes. One class has 39 students, the other two float comfortably in the low, mid-30s. I’m travelling between two classrooms – the class I use for two periods currently has no working AC – the heat is of a level that would help propel Kozol up the bestseller’s list if he were to document it.

In any case, all of this flux, change, and curmudgeony frustration with conditions has had me thinking about the “story” that our classroom spaces provide. As struggling-to-keep-our-heads-above-water teachers, classroom design is usually little more than doing our best to figure out how to cram class libraries in the limited bookshelves, how to arrange desks, and what posters to slap on the walls. That’s not a sleight to teachers – lord knows we can be spending our time on tons of activities that help improve instruction and student experience. However, when I look at the evolution of modern office spaces, I can’t help but wonder how this evolution can trickle into my classroom in South Central.

Similarly, I’ve been thinking about Joshua Prince-Ramus’ talk about the Seattle Library’s ultra-utilitarian design and wonder if there is a better lens to look at my four-walled space than the factory-oriented school model through which I’ve been inculcated; “Constraining Innovation” indeed.

Since studying narrative theory and mobile media through a generally awesome cognate course last quarter, I’ve been reading through this text on architecture, game play and space. Reading about ways that a place like Disneyland weaves narrative into space such that the guest is already well-immersed in an overarching narrative or theme well before ever sitting in the Haunted Mansion’s “ride,” for instance makes me think about how these kinds of spatial narratives are being disregarded within my school. In his essay in the book, Henry Jenkins quotes Disney Imagineer Don Carson saying, “The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell.” He later writes that an iconic attraction like “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” is designed such that “the original tale provides ‘a set of rules that guide the design and project team to a common goal’ and help give structure and meaning to the visitor’s experience.” Sure, our school’s shift to uniforms this past year and repainting of offices helps send a kind of message or narrative to the students. However, is it one that is engaging? One that adds intrigue? One that poses problems to be solved? Encourages exploration?

Finally, Lev Manovich writes about the potential of “augmented space.” I’m still working through this. As I continue to ponder the prospects of a CryptoZoo invasion in South Central (as an ongoing 11th grade project), I wonder how the differences between immersion and augmentation can be looked at within a portable “bungalow” with no AC.