Holocaust Remembrance

Tonight I attended the Holocaust Remembrance Program of the Greater Syracuse Community themed Never Again: What you do matters. At the Remembrance they had a hallway dedicated to the winners of the art competition held throughout Syracuse middle and high schools.

For the competition students were encouraged to create what "Never Again: What you do matters" means to you. It was great to see the different ways students represented the Holocaust and what the event meant to them. There was one picture where the page was filled with random words all over describing the word remember. There was one where a student had sculpted a picture of women looking out of window through clay. There was a few pictures where students had drawn using crayons or colored pencils different representations of concentration camps. There was an excellent sketch by a high school girl that was a large portrait of a concentration camp where she used simple shading with black and white to create an image of pain and sadness.

Seeing how students used different forms of art to make sense of such a terrible part of our history really hit home to me as to how important art can be for students. Using it as a form of expression in this case allowed the students to get their feelings of pain, sadness, and helplessness that was captured inside of them from learning about the Holocaust.

Rubrics

I think rubrics are a great way for assessing student work. First, rubrics provide students with a direction as to what the teacher is looking for in the final product. There are no surprises, no hidden agendas, students know exactly what is expected of them. Second, I think rubrics provide the teacher with reasons for grades. When parents call in and ask why their son or daughter received a failing grade on the project, myself as the teacher can say well according to their grading sheet, they were missing this, this, and this and didn't complete this, this, and this and so on.

I had an interesting experience with using a rubric during my student teaching. There was a rubric created for students book report projects. The projects were quite extensive as was the rubric. Many times, I found myself looking over projects thinking they were done very nicely but when graded against the rubric for the content I was really looking for, many of them did match up to the grades I would have given them if I was just going off my first assumption. I think that is a great example of how important rubrics can be so teacher's aren't being bias in their grading and also so that teachers can really assess the content they are looking for.

It Was Always the Pictures

I really enjoyed reading this article because it contained many good ideas for me in my future classroom. I think having many different ways to create visual aids could benefit many students in a classroom, despite their classification in a school setting.

I particularly liked the section on using graphic organizers. When I was student teaching at Pine Grove Middle School, my sixth graders were taught about different forms of graphics organizers. It was established by the grade level that graphic organizers was something teachers really wanted students to learn and utilize. In every sixth grade classroom there were about 10 posters hanging on the walls with each one showing a different layout for a graphic organizer. Students were encouraged to use whatever style worked best for them whenever they felt it might help them.

As a teacher in this setting, I felt it was my job to structure lessons and activities around the possibility of using a graphic organizer. I wanted my students to have the chance, if they choose to use it, to use the graphic organizer and receive as much practice as possible while I could be there to guide them through it. I thought it was great that all the teachers were working with the graphic organizers and that there were so many different choices for students to choose that hopefully everyone was able to find a style that would work for him/her.