Monday, January 27th, 2014

Students do this: 

1) Pass in your Stranger book, if you haven't. And your Beans book.
2) Take the poll; here is a link to the live poll.
3) Review the calendar tab above.

Vocabulary Words w/Colbert of Daily Show Video

Circle Question: If you were forced to live in another non-English speaking country, where would you go?

Revise Beans Essay
You'll be receiving a score sheet on your essay.  Revise your essay, fixing the items indicated.  We'll have a little lesson on each requirement.

Funny in Farsi
New book!  We'll be starting the book Funny in Farsi about a young girl who moves from Iran to America.  We''' be trying to understand the book through the lens of culture, as well as identifying themes as we read. Opening activity: use Google street view take a tour of the places mentioned.

Design a school challenge

You will have a given amount of time to create a school that fulfills the criteria below and prepare a presentation of that school. New wrinkle: you will be creating an enhanced podcast (with pictures) to present your school.

Requirements:
Using your knowledge of philosophy and architecture you will be designing a school.  You challenge is to design a completely new kind of school that you believe will effective in teaching students to excel in the modern world.  The school must teach kids to:
--solve problems;
--be resilient and have grit;
--take care of themselves and others;
--be a nice person.

You will be designing:
--a curriculum(what is taught and how its taught);
--a building to house the students and faculty and;
--the rules for the school(what teachers and students can and cannot do and a description of the organizational structure of the administration and/or students).

You must be able to explain how your three chosen philosophies influence your decisions.